The number of layers depends of how you apply the paint.

In my case, I applied 3 coats of primer and about 5-6 coats of paint. But my coats were very thin. When I applied the primer, you could still see a little bit the part through the 2 first coats. That's why i applied a 3rd layer so that the part is covered properly everywhere. For the paint same. The paint was completely covering the part only after the 3rd coat. I generally applied 2 or 3 more after that to ensure of the durability.

If your case as deep scratches, you can apply a 2-3 coats of primer, then sand it again with a high grid sand paper (1500 - 2000). This first primer layers will fill the scratches and give the surfaces flat. Then you can reapply 1-2 coast of primer just to cover any metal that would have been uncovered during the 2nd sanding and then go ahead with the paint.

But if you go for a shiny finish, it is generally advised to sand again between primer and paint. And again sand lightly between the paint and the clear coat. It is particularly worth it for the outside of the case.

Where did you make the acrylic cover ? How did you pierce the holes for the cables and tubing ?


Looks good mate

Do you have a picture of your PC with the acrylic plate ?

You should be able to find hole saw in pretty much any hardware shop

Depends of the quality. But generally to cut through aluminum, you don't need good quality as it is rather soft. I think I bought mine around RM 20 - 25.


Lol. You can always remove the rivets by drilling them, then putting back new one

No camera with your phone ?

Probably one of the last update: I finally painted and installed the fans.

Masking the fans was quite time consuming and boring. But I am quite happy with the results. Below are the fans after painting and sleeving.



And I've taken few more pictures of the finished rig








This post has been edited by r4st4m4n: Sep 12 2009, 07:30 PM

Yup, I don't like the cluster of cable too. I have to take a notch out of the middle plate, behind the mobo rail so I can pass the cables directly from the bottom of the case to the back of the mobo tray.
But for that I need a dremel ... :/

Oh yeah, the yellow wire is because I forgot to put it nicely after I undervolted the rads fan.

I olso have to sleeve the power switch/led wires of the case.

For those of you who are using the Scythe Slipstream fans, I would recommend to undervolt them at 5V.

I am using the 1600 RPM ones (high) and once hooked up to the rad they were quite noisy. It is actually no the fan itself which is noisy, but because they are pushing lot of CFM, the air through the rad is doing quite some noise. Somemore, with my tj-07, once I closed the case, the grill at the bottom was also adding some noise as the fan are closed to it and again because of the turbulence created.

I am not a silence freak, but the noise was quite loud. Not a problem when gaming, but when just browsing, I don't need that much cooling and that much noise.

So I have undervolted them to 5V (just use a fan header to molex adapter and hook the + of the fan to the 5V of the molex instead of 12V).
Now they are running a 1050 RPM @ 5V and they are a lot (and I mean A LOT) quieter.

I was a bit worry that the temp would be a lot higher (although max CPU@57*c and max GPU@50+*C I had some room to spare). But the temp have actually barely changed. There is max +1*C on the CPU when running P95, and 1-2*C on the GPU when running ATI tool

Below is some 40min running P95 and ATI tool together for maximum heat generated (I have GPU + CPU on the same loop), rad fans at 5V / 1050 RPM.



Very acceptable temperatures versus noise level which is like 10 times better than before. Now, the most noisy component in my rig during gamin are the GC caps which whistle during high load

I have also started to see what it would take to get to 3.6GHz from 3.2GHz. My CPU is a dude, I need to pump 1.54V idle / 1.49V load (CPU-z readings) to pass 30 min OCCT stress test

But even with the fan at 5V the temps are still acceptable at max 70*C (that's the max I am willing to go anyways). But I am not sure whether I will leave run it at this voltage as this doesn't really change anything in everyday use and everything is running much hotter (including my room ).

Now I am thinking to solder a switch to have the possibility to switch the fans from 5V to 12V when gaming. But I am not sure it is very good for the PSU

I agree. I will definitely buy black PCB GC and mobo for my next upgrades

Here you go:







Yup, the noise was because of the fins as I tested the fan "alone" and they were not noisy at all. But now @5V, it is barely noticeable.


Not a bad idea. Although I would have to make a notch in the acrylic plate as the bottom of the RAM slots is really close to the GC PCB on this board.

Not sure yet for the mobo. As I said in a post earlier, I was maybe thinking of an i5 + P55, but the fact the P55 only allows 2 x PCI-E x8 for crossfire/SLI bothers me. I don't upgrade the mobo often, so I rather take one that is future proof. I could upgrade to i7, but I am not really interested in spending RM3k "only" to get a black PCB mobo. So I might wait for the 32nm westmere supposed to launch Q1 next year or if I find a good bargain for a 2nd hand x48 mobo with black PCB, I might go for it.

Yes, sure

The only problem I foresee is we need to have a heatgun or hair dryer for the heatshrink ... I think Starbuck staff will start to freak out if we use it inside the coffe shop

PM me, so we can decide a date and place

That's what I want to do but I need a dremel to do it properly ...

See the end of my post : http://forum.lowyat.net/index.php?showtopi...post&p=28599109

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.

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

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.

Update Coming Soon

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.

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:

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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

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

I haven't tried the patch but from what I've read people have problems with the patch too. I'm gonna try it though, it can't hurt ...

And yeah, I'm eagerly waiting for the first official driver ... 22nd of October and still no 9.10 out

But from what I've read, it's not sure whether ATI can fix the problem with driver as it seems to be a problem from the game with the PhysX drivers, which ATI do not have control ... :/

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Added on October 23, 2009, 1:03 amActually, after installing the patch, It is much better. Not perfect though as there are still some tracks were there are micro stuttering but at least it is playable now.

This post has been edited by r4st4m4n: Oct 23 2009, 01:03 AM