UPDATE 6.0
Multiplay Insomnia Gaming Festival 60 is but days away! JUICE was always earmarked for competition in time for this event. It is after all, primarily my new LAN rig. That wasn't to be, with a number of speed bumps along the way, sadly JUICE won't be finished in time for LAN. But it will be coming..
Oh yes, I present, MODZERO JUICE STAGE 1.0...
or at least I will present it a little further down... sorry.
JUICE is running off a single 960 PRO 256gb NVMe drive, I'd not intended to add anymore storage. But will all my games installed on two 250gb SATA SSDs in my main rig and LAN being so soon, I thought about how best to make use of those SATA SSDs.
So I bought one of
these..
I thought, I'd pull the two drives from my other rig, label them and hot-swap between the drives as and when. But, I had visions of losing a drive or disconnecting it when in game. So I went a different route.
The NFC S4 MINI can mount two 2.5" drives in front/behind the GPU. Yet I'd previously written this mounting option off for three reasons.
- Knowing I was putting a toasty GPU in there I'd always thought the SSDs would get cooked
- The HDPLEX molex/sata power connection on the PSU was tucked in tight at the back of the chassis partially under the motherboard.
- I'd not seen anyone else fit the drives and do a cracking job of the power/sata cable routing.
Challenge accepted.. :rock:
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Firstly I took my two drives (two different drives) and covered the backside in matt black vinyl. Mounted them on the cage then proceeded 'to throw all the toys out the pram' when I couldn't find the two last screws... (They were holding my power connection in place... why I used two of the screws for this job I've no idea...)
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It was almost a none starter.. not only is it tight, but the cables actually foul the clear CMOS pins on the board. I'd had to be sure the wires ran between the pins... the whole build would have to be dismantled to sort that, had it been the case.
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With a sizable gap between the CPU cooler and the PCI riser (where my Matrix orb will be fitted) I planned to run the SATA power cables directly down to the PCB and across to the PSU.
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I'm not a huge fan of heatshrink cables and SATA (at least this choice of connector) is level leet when attempting the heatshrinkless approach, alas I'm not
pOpe so I rolled with it (I'm already planning to redo it when I move on to Stage 2).
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Not a flattering angle, but you get the idea. I'd just been training the bends and had sagged the sleeve. :rolleyes:
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With it fitted to the SSDs, now came the PITA. I'm not all too confident with soldering, but how else am I going to get any better. With the harness in place and the PSU in there too, I had a lot of already short cables to shorten and solder... with the prospect of starting over if I messed up (I only had the exact number of SATA terminals) hanging over me, a mistake at this point would have been a rage quit. haha..
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Done, all the connections were solid, the heatshink suffered as the wires heated up but with that end of the loom being down running along the PCB I wasn't too concerned.
Next was the bloody 24PIN, well, all the other cables really! If you've been following along you'll remember I've not been a huge fan of my pervious efforts. I loved the colors... individually, but struggled to make them work once fitted in a combination that really blended with the color scheme.
I touched on it a couple updates ago (I think) but I'd bought more sleeve in just the blue and the grey. So the plan was to re-sleeve the GPU, POWER and CPU. Then make a new 24pin.
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The old one was just a little too long in many of the wires which caused it to push up against the RAM more then I'd like.. I took my time, dropped the partial sleeve from last time and it worked out much better IMO.
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This time round i was able to have the PSU end come up from the bottom, which would enable to power adapter cable to run flush over the top, much better then before.
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Lastly I used more of the matt black vinyl to mute the silver/red motherboard stickers.
SO....
It's not finished....
But.
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What do you think?
J.
