Atomic MOBY (2001)  

    In the beginning...

    This is the third (and final?) incarnation of an ongoing mod project, the projects name represents both its atomic theme and the famous white whale.  I tried to think of everything I could mod on my PC, not just the case itself.  The main board is mildly modded, as well as the ram, HSF and video card, I even modded my power supply.  This has been an ongoing work for almost two years now and although it was fun I am glad to be finished, there's not much else that can be done to it anyway, it's full. 

Side Mods:

    The side panel of my case has a 12x16" window with translucent molding that I slid blue glo-wire under the outer edge of.  I also drilled an 80mm fan hole in the side window and installed an Antec blue lighted fan with a dual ring blue CCFL AngelMod that I used the marker trick on.  An atomic etch and 80mm atomic fan grill highlight the window, and the 60mm heat sink fan atomic grill and 92mm power supply atomic grills can be seen as well as the two rear exhaust atomic grills through the window.  Two 12" blue cold cathodes (one on the bottom and one up the back) and two 4" blue cold cathodes (one on the inside of the rear fans and one up the front edge highlighting the badge collection) as well as a blue xenon strobe make the interior nice and bright when it's all turned on at once.

Front Mods:

    The front of my case is heavily modded as well.  On the top I have a Lazer LED unit shining down the front face.  My 5 1/4" bays from top to bottom hold a Matrix Orbital MX222 LCD, PCmods rheobus (controlling the 2 back fans, the side fan and the top fan), stealthed CD/RW DVD combo drive and finally a Lian Li removable hard drive bay.  From top to bottom my 3.5" bays house another rheobus (controlling the front 2 fans, my north bridge fan and my memory fan), floppy drive that I dissasssembled and painted to match the case and a 3.5" four switch bay I made to control some of the lights (three more switches are on the back).  I replaced the orange and green power and HDD activity LED's with some blue LED's that I bought pre-wired for the MB pin out.  The front bottom fan intake area and the stock Lian-Li filter were completely removed and black anodized filters were installed behind a pair of 80mm atomic grills.  The atomic fan grills had to be lapped on the inside edges to fit side by side and the seam is almost invisible.  I placed a 4" blue CCFL behind the grills and filters to accent the LED fans lighting.  The Antec LED fans and CCFL glow nicely behind the atomic grills and the lazer LED's shine bright down from the top.  A second Lazer LED unit was added to the bottom of the case and shines out beneath, a very cool effect.

Bottom Mods:

    I had to mod the feet of my case to allow enough clearance for the lazer LED's, this was accomplished by using common furniture glides that I bought at a hardware store.  This was the easiest mod ever as the glides simply screwed into each foot after I removed the retention peg.  I painted the feet with black vinyl dye, trimmed off the inside tabs and put a shiny rounded nut onto the end of each glide.  The only downside was the back right foot, a real pain in the ass as it was right at the edge of the removable MB tray guide and had to be dremeled a bit to allow the nut to fit, if I had to do it over I would have left the tabs on that one foot and skipped putting a nut on it, the other three were easy.

Top Mods:

    The top of my case has a window with two 80mm fan holes I drilled out and translucent molding with glo-wire accenting the outside edge.  Two 12" blue CCFL's, an EL atomic applique and two of PCmods pricey but pretty blue LED fans with 80mm atomic grills finish out the window.  There are four aluminum case handles on top, I had originally planned on having only two, one up front and one in back.  After replacing the top rivets with fan screws and cutting the window hole I realized that two case handles would not work (the top was far too distressed) so I went with four, two on each side.  The four handles actually get their strength from the sides of the chassis and the case handles have large washers that sit against the inner lip using the strength of the whole chassis making them usable rather than completely decorative.

System Mods:

    I did a few mods to my system components that are also noteworthy.  Starting with the main board, an ASUS A7N8X Deluxe, the north bridge fan was replaced by a Vantec Iceberq copper chipset cooler, and the south bridge has the Vantec copper heat sink.  The power supply, an Antec true blue 480, was excessively modded at one point but the blue acrylic cover I used had to go, my poor case would have died if it were cut up enough to allow the modded PSU to fit.  I ended up putting the original cover back on with the 92mm atomic grill, slapped on a high voltage sticker and said good enough.  The Antec PSU and the rear Antec LED fans with two cold cathodes right next to them shine bright out the back of my case, also there are three more switches on the back of my case that control lights (not shown).  The Lian Li case came with one rear exhaust hole, I had to drill the other and if you look at how well the atomic grills line up you will see how precise a job this was.  The stock grill cover on my Vantec 6035D HSF has been replaced by a slick 60mm atomic grill and if I could find the same grill in a 40mm variety I would put one on my active ramsink.  All my drives are secured with thumb screws and I have a case badge collection on the side of the drive cage. 

More Mods:

    My video card is also modded, I replaced the stock fan on my GeForce3 card with a blue orb and used the heatsinks from the memory cooling kit on the video card memory.  There are Thermaltake active and passive heat spreaders on my ram, the memory fan is rheobus controlled.

SYSTEM SPECS:

Lian Li PC-60USB Case w/12x16 Window / Antec TrueBlue480W PSU

Asus A7N8X Deluxe / AMD Athlon XP 2100+ / Vantec CCK-6035D

PNY Verto GeForce3 w/Thermaltake Ramsinks & Blue Orb Mod

2 X Crucial 512mb PC2100 w/Thermaltake Active/Passive Cooling

2 X 80GB Western Digital 8mb on SATA RAID-0 w/Highpoint adapters

80GB Maxtor ATA133 7200RPM / Lian Li Mobile Hard Drive Rack

Samsung 48x24x48 CD/RW 16x DVD Combo / Matrix Orbital MX222

 Leadtek Winfast TV2000 Deluxe / 3Com V.90 Non-Win Modem

Mitsumi Floppy / Logitech Z-640 5.1 / Nokia 445XiPlus 21" Monitor

 EluminX keyboard / Nostromo Speedpad n50 / HP Officejet 6110