Old school case modding

clbrunson

New Member
Comming back to this forum and checking out the posts on case mods got me thinking back to my old days of serious geekyness and I thought I would share and let you all see how case modding used to be done when it was in it's infantcy. At the time I did this little project, a bunch of new ideas were comming out and I did my best to include them all, with my little spin on things.

I lost all my old pictures of my computer when it was finished. I learned a valuable lesson to back up data often, and to keep it secure and safe. I now have a "black armour" hdd that I keep in a fire safe that holds my backups.

Anyway, these pictures (and a ton more) were sent to my father in an email and are the only ones to survive so I don't have the pictures of when "Fire-Water" was complete. When she was done, she was completely water cooled (including gpu) at 200 gph using a peltier, copper blocks, a Hayden tranny radiator and three Sunami 120mm fans, all monitored by Compunurses. I shit you not, the lights in the dinning room would dim when I powered her on.

She ran a 1.4 gig AMD Thunderbird as her last cpu (oc'ed to 1.7) which was the most powerfull cpu of the day. She had RAID and 7200rpm hdds, a GF3 gpu w/64 megs of ddr (stood in line on the day of release), 512megs of ddr ram with ThermalTake coolers, Blue Orb mb fan, and the first digital LCD monitor released to the public (HP1810 to the tune of $2000). She had a Sound Blaster Live Platinum card with the Live Drive and a FM/TV tuner card with a POWER rising antenea! I figure I put more than $5,000 into this beast.

This computer was tragically lost more than 8 years ago. Funny, her specs would still turn heads today...

Fire-Water2.jpg


Fire-Water1.jpg


Fire-Water3.jpg


Fire-Water4.jpg


Fire-Water5.jpg
 
WOW! Very nice job, very retro. I especially like the WhoopAss Sticker... you should tell me where you got it!
 
Yeah, I know I'm just talking to myself here, but I'm really going down memory lane with this. My original idea had been to keep this computer proprietary showing that any computer could be seriously over-clocked and modded. But... my cooling made my decition for me. My peltier and water-cooling were so good that condensation built up around my heatsink (between peltier and cpu) and soaked the mobo frying it. I figured that if I had to replace it, I might as well get the real deal. I already knew the HP version of the Asus A7M-266 (volt mods, ect) so I just bought the Asus version. Unfortunatly, the BIOS wasn't swapable so I had to buy all new software as the HP stuff won't run without the HP BIOS. Fond memories...
 
WOW! Very nice job, very retro. I especially like the WhoopAss Sticker... you should tell me where you got it!

Whoa! There is somebody out there. Thanks for the compliment. As far as retro, lol, this was cutting edge at it's time! I started that project like ten years ago. Sorry, I can't tell you where I got the sticker as it was many years ago...
 
that looks so sweet!! How much time have you put into that thing? And also, is that just an old generic HP case that you started off with?
 
that looks so sweet!! How much time have you put into that thing? And also, is that just an old generic HP case that you started off with?

I had the computer custom built by the HP business dept. It took me perhaps two years to complete and by the time I was done, there was nothing HP left except the case (and perhaps the CD burner). I caught some real crap from forumoc for using an HP, but my folding numbers told the real story :eek:
 
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