[jqp]

With a new video card and a new drive cage I had to completely re-architect my case. Luckily the mobo stayed where it was, but I had to rewire and move drives around.

The new video card is an upgrade to my embedded graphics chip on the mobo. The problem is that this is a relatively large card which can go only in the single PCIe slot on the board, and with this mid-tower case and motherboard design it collides with my 3.5" internal drive cage.

So I had to give up the lowest of the 4 drive positions in my 3.5" internal drive cage in this Antec case. I also added a Kingwin 3.5in Internal SATA Hot Swap Mobile Rack (very nice) and an IDE Mobile rack.


The SATA hot swap cage - it takes the bare drive, no enclosure needed!


So, all this required a complete rewiring. I labeled my SATA cables as "1"-"4" with a permanent marker while I was at it. I cleaned dust off my fans.

I am concerned about my 350 watt power supply - I am thinking about a 500 watt supply since I now have these power consumers in this mid-tower case:

GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB DDR3
4 SATA drives
1 IDE drive
1 IDE DVD burner
1-3 external USB drives
AMD X2 4200+


After the changes -- it is a tight fit

I did not anticipate the video card when I built this PC - I thought I would stick with the embeded GeForce 6150.



The orange rectangle shows where the video card intersects with the drive cage. I did have a SATA drive in that position. The pink arrow shows the edge of the new PCIe video card (auxiliary power connector)


The SATA drive cage is below (when upright) the IDE drive cage.

Anyone else running into these issues? What case do you like (I require 4-5 external drive bays)? I think my next case will have to be bigger - I wanted to go smaller, but it just seems to be trouble in the long run.

[Thump553]

I assume you are using your extra hard drives for storing music mostly.  If so, I've found external hard drives, especially the plain jane USB 2.0 only, to be very acceptable and a great bargain.  Keep an eye on the hot deals forums at Fat Wallet or Anandtech for good deals-I just got a 400GB for way under $100 (I want to say $50 after rebate but I don't really remember).

Do you monitor the heat inside your case using something like Mother Board Monitor?  I'd be a bit worried with all those internal HD.  I'm no expert, but you probably are stretching it a bit with your current power supply, I'd keep my eyes open for one of those as well.

Great job on squeezing everything in.  I just had to replace the power supply in one of my computers and had a real tight fit between the back ends of the power supply and the DVD drive.

[jqp]

This is my main machine for everything at this time. In addition to music I do video processing on it.

ACtually the CPU is currently 84F and the mobo is 94F. but the CPU gets to 100+ at times. I monitor with "ASUS Probe" and will definitely continue as I but the case together and modify fans/cooling.