It's not powder coated, it is just painted. It cost me RM 70. The problem was that the mobo tray was chromed and therefore they had to used special chemical for the primer or the pain wouldn't stick.

The paint will waer off easily on the screw hole surrounding area after screwed?

Not easily but yes, it will wear off if you over tighten them. You have to be a bit careful when putting it together. But even if it wears a bit, this is hidden behind the screw (obviously) so it's not a big issue either

Icic...Do u think powder coat will have this kind of wear off problem?
Because i'm planning to do powder coat for my casing...

No, I think powder coat should be much stronger. Although i haven't really seen any powder case in real life, so I'm just telling what I heard.

Powder coating is for sure better

nice modding Martin... after seeing the picture of yours, it gives me an idea on how should i do for the waterpump...

Update Coming Soon

wow nice gfx fast2 pix it up

Well actually there a few of problems I have to solve first.

1) The card is looooooooong and it hits my res so I need to drill new holes in the motherboard tray for the res holders.
2) I need to redo the loop since I have to remove the GPU block from the holder graphic card which implies to purge the loop. I could just do a simple switch of card but
3) I my tube became cloudy since I first installed the loop. I'm not sure to what it is due, either algae or some residue left in the rad. Either way, I have to take apart completely the loop, check inside the blocks, clean it and hook everything again. Another problem is I don't have enough tube left to redo the tubing so I need to buy/order ...

.. the joys of water cooling

So for the moment I have put the card in my old air cooled C2D rig as I wanted to test the card before to remove the stock cooler anyway.

Will post some pix later about the problem 1 and 3 above.

Wow VERY nice modded you got there!

No offense but I want to learn, isn't it too many fans since you already water cooled it?

go martin go.. it's a joy to see what you've done to your mod case

damn... lol.. i was about to get that too >.<

if you get that i smell something fishy that ur gc will be put on sale.. hahaha

All right, time for an update unfortunately, the news are not so good.

Here is just a quick summary of all the sh*t that happened

1) The graphic card was too long and hit the res. Therefore I had to drill new holes in the motherboard tray.
2) My loop was full of algae so I had to remove everything, take apart all the blocks and the pump and clean everything.
3) Since I was eager to play with this baby, I hooked it up to my E4300 rig. I've also installed NFS shift to test it in game. It was working but the result were not that great, with FPS dipping in the low 20s at the start of the grid 1680x1050 2xAA, 16xAF and when I check 5870 reviews, I see they get min FPS in the high 30s at 2560x1600 16xCFAA 16x AF
4) I'm thinking, maybe because of the early drivers. I check for the newest driver on AMD website (I was using the one provided on the CD) and find out there is no driver for Win XP (yeah, I know ... I'm kinda die hard XP fan ), only for Vista or Win 7. So I'm thinking it may be because the drivers are not optimized for XP.
5) Take out my Velociraptor from my main rig, install Vista on it in my old rig. Install the newest drivers, about the same results in NFS.
6) I'm thinking I have only 2GB of RAM, maybe it is not enough for Vista. One trip to digital mall later I got myself 4GB of Kingston HyperX. Install it, still same ... :/
7) I check CPU usage in NFS, I see both cores almost at 100%. So I take out the Q6600 from my main rig, install it on my old rig. It helps a bit as the min FPS is a bit smoother, but average still about the same, not what I could expect from a 5870. Turns out NFS only use 2 cores anyways, but 4 cores helped as the OS processes could run on the 2 other cores, hence the slightly better min FPS.
8) I'm thinking, maybe the P35 chipset can't handle the 5870, so I rebuild my loop. During the build, I have been thinking about WCing the 5870 with my MCW 60 but there is a small VRM to cool and I don't have a sink that would fit and also I had 2 or 3 weird crashes towards the end.
9) So after spending the best part of my WE to clean and rebuild my loop (CPU only), I finally finishes. Install the card, install the drivers, reboot and then starts to install others drivers on Vista but the PC starts to crash randomly ...
10) I think, it may be due to a bad Vista install (I just switch the HDD from my old to new rig without reinstalling) so I decide to make a clean Vista install. then I reinstall the VGA drivers and there it is even worst. As soon as I log in the desktop freezes, I see many artifacts and the PC crashes every 30 seconds
11) Put back the 5870 into my old rig under XP and same, I got crashes and artifacts all over the screen.


Conclusion: after 2 vista installations, switching of CPU, of RAM, of OS, taking apart my WC loop, cleaning it and putting everything back together and countless drivers uninstall and reinstall the card is more or less dead ...

I have already brought back the card to the shop (AOnePlus in digital mall), the have tested it with the same results so they are doing a 1-to-1 exchange
... except that I have to wait until tomorrow since they only had mine in stock but I don't care, as long as I'm getting a new one

So I'm still not sure why I was getting bad results in NFS in the first place, but now I think that the card might have been bad from the beginning, except that it was not showing it. After few hours of gaming / usage the problem started to really show until the card is now unusable.

Below is the picture of the rig once I put back everything together (CPU only loop) and before I realized the card was dead:

---

Added on October 19, 2009, 4:39 pmThanks. The fan are there more for the look than functionality. I did feel the top of the case became hot when there was not the 120mm fan at the top. Adding them avoid that the heat gets trapped.

This post has been edited by r4st4m4n: Oct 19 2009, 04:45 PM

mind to show ure hdd cage from the front..

edited..
cos i got no idea how to mount the cage in the bay..

This post has been edited by soundaddict: Oct 21 2009, 08:27 PM

sucks bro D:, so ur HD5870 died just after u bought it =X??

no worry since TS said he already got 1 to 1 exchange over the GC...

My HDD are in the 5.25' bay, I bought some adapters and painted them in black (RM 5 for the pair at All IT LY):




Yup, that's right. Already received the replacement unit. And it works great

3dmark Vantage HD 5870@stock - Q6600@3.6GHz



Crysis Warhead benchmark:



For the moment, I leave the stock cooler as I have been scared enough by the first one. I'll probably get a full cover block for this card once I feel more comfortable that the card is 100% stable

I also want to upgrade my monitor as 1680x1050 is almost too easy for this card

One thing that sucks though is NFS shift. Those idiots @ EA programmed the game so that it runs nicely only on NVIDIA card due to PhysX killing the framerate if you have an ATI
My FPS dips below the 20s in some case and there are lot of micro stuttering which kills the game play. I guess a Quad core @ 3.6GHz and a 5870 just doesn't meet the min. requirements for this game

This post has been edited by r4st4m4n: Oct 22 2009, 04:31 PM

guess u had to get the patch for the nfs shift ( if u got the ahem version ), the 5870 is the best card ever and should have that kind of performance.
or wait till ati release new driver for the card.
1st working driver arent that great