The 2007 holiday season is in full swing and I've been a busy boy. I'm working on my end of 2007 mod, but it won't be finished until the end of January due to the custom painting that's coming soon. My theme is the new Alien vs. Predator: Requiem movie. It came out on Christmas day and I just saw it a few days ago. What an awesome movie! Most of the movie theme will be captured by some custom painting on the side panels that my oldest son will be helping me with in early to mid January. I've made a custom X-View panel for the front panel and some interior mods to the case (a Cooler Master Cosmos 1000). The hardware is mostly complete and Windows Vista 64-bit is installed (what a pain it is). Tomorrow is a LAN party gaming debut for the AVP Requiem machine with it's SLI 8800 GT's and Black Edition AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ (running at 3.2 GHz).

Here are the parts (most are installed); 80% of the procurement occurred on Black Friday and Thanksgiving weekend via on-line ordering:

* Cooler Master Cosmos 1000 case
* Cooler Master Aerogate I fan controller
* Cooler Master Blue and Violet Silent Fans (4)
* Cooler Master Real Power Pro 850W PSU
* Foxcon C51XEM2AA-8EKRS2H nForce 590 SLI AMD motherboard
* Seagate ST3500320AS 500 GB SATA 32MB buffer hard drives (2 for 1 TB)
* Zalman CNPS9700 LED CPU cooler
* Zalman VF900-cu LED VGA coolers (2)
* AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ Black Edition CPU (running at 3.2 GHz)
* Corsair TWINX PC6400 DDR2 EPP SLI memory (2 X 1GB)
* XFX Geforce 8800 GT XXX 512 MB Alpha Dog Edition videocard (2)
* Asus DVD burner (SATA)
* Light On DVD burner (SATA)
* Creative Xtreme Gamer sound card
* Microsoft Windows Vista 64-bit Home Premium OEM



...and here are some pictures taken over the past few weeks.


My favorite part of the build process - buying new hardware! As usual, I only build AMD machines.

One terabyte of storage should be enough, don't you think? These are fast SATA drives with 32MB buffers.

The 850W Cooler Master PSU and Cosmos 1000 case arrived from SVC.com.

Now it's time to integrate a Cooler Master Cross Flow fan that I've owned for about 2 years.

I picked up four of these 120mm Cooler Master Silent LED fans in purple, but I've used a combination of purple and blue fans.

First boot on December 8th, and everything was connected properly. You learn a thing or two after building a dozen machines.

I need to fabricate a custom bracket to hold the Cross Flow fan. This is why I keep aluminum bar in stock. Presto - bending while you wait.

First I mount the aluminum bracket to the Cross Flow fan. Once installed, air will drawn in below the fan and pushed over the motherboard.

Now I must tap the holes that will allow screws to hold the Cross Flow fan. I am able to pass wires under the fan so they may reach the motherboard.

I like movie themed cases. Remember when The Matrix came out? How many people did a Matrix themed case? Loads. But all very unique. Non were even remotely the same.

Its not the theme that makes a case different, its the imagination of the creator.

Nice specs for this. Cant wait to see what transpires.

Hey now, this'll be an interesting one. I'll be watchin'!

Oooo a mod by Bigal, looks very interesting. Been plotting it since thanksgiving and u couldn't give us a spoiler .

Anyways look nice, the specs are also nice, and the case looks good should be a nice mod specially with ur idea's.

I should go see AvP, whether it be the new one or the old one .



Very true, although i was very young when the matrix came out....back in the 1990's

Specs on the parts are nice. How much did it cost you for the parts. Did you have to line up at the store overnight

Oh, the big question - how much did it cost... Well I've been keeping track of the cost this time. Usually I don't want to know. Would you believe that the two videocards alone cost just over $650? They were very hard to get a month ago. The price isn't much cheaper right now either - just better availability. In any case, I'm in for just a hair over $2K, counting shipping. I did get some good deals on the parts, like $99 for the CPU from TigerDirect, and I also have over $200 in rebates coming from the black Friday sales (as in $80 for the motherboard rebate, $50 for the PSU rebate, $30 for the case rebate, and $40 for the memory rebate). I bought 95% of the hardware on-line, looking for rebates and free shipping but mostly I was happy to find the parts I wanted at decent prices. I will be paying my son to do the painting too, but that's under negotiation at this point.

Ok, here are a few more pictures that show the custom front panel display using a Thermaltake X-View kit that you can no longer buy. I've used these kits for most of my "Big Al's Computers" logos on my custom cases 'cause they work so well to illuminate a stencil image.

Wish me luck with gaming at our LAN party later today. This Windows Vista 64-bit has crashed at least a dozen times, especially when installing software. That DEP setting (that you apparently cannot turn off completely) interferes with Windows Installer. Call of Duty 4 is installed and stable.

One side note. I don't have the VGA coolers in hand yet - they are due to arrive this coming Wednesday. Each time I reboot the machine I must use nTune to set the GPU fans to at least 55% (they default to 29% after every reboot). The custom rules don't appear to work in Vista 64-bit like they do in Windows XP 32-bit. The CPU runs nice and cool with that Zalman CPU cooler, so I'm hoping for cool temps on the GPU's when the new VF900-cu LED coolers arrive.


I took advantage of an above-freezing day to paint the side panels in my back yard.

The Thermaltake X-View kit is on the left, and the other pic's show my cropping and print of the AVPR symbol from their movie poster.

I decided not to trim the letters at all and popped the AVPR symbol on top of the X-View electroluminescent panel, covered by the bay grill cover.

Liking it so far, cant wait to see it when its finished.

Tonight I wasn't a happy camper. In fact I wasn't even camping in any game as they kept crashing on me. I struggled so much just to get a few games installed and even if they start up they will soon crash - sometimes giving me blue screen crash dumps. I've tried Quake IV about 20 times, even installing the latest patch (where I had to use the /NCRC option in the command line to bypass the cyclic redundancy code check).

You'll love this one. I found a link for the Vista SP1 RC, and I downloaded it (750 MB). I tried installing it about 3 times, and on the fourth attempt it really hosed my install. The machine wouldn't boot up even to the logon menu - it just kept resetting itself like a Chatty Kathy doll pulling her own string. I used Windows repair and it claimed my system was corrupted along with needing to repair the 1 TB Raid assembly with scan disk. After several rounds with Windows repair, I finally got it to boot again (loading a past restore point). I was so close to giving up on Vista and going for a Windows XP install. But I'm still in Vista right now.

My friends that came over for gaming have been enjoying themselves however. Greg was playing Call of Duty 4, Tom (my son) was playing World of Warcraft, and my other son's friend was playing Unreal Tournament III. My other son is still out with my wife attending a King Edward II play tonight. Bless his heart.....

Tonight I have solved the problem with random reboots and crashes! I was pushing the CPU too far - setting the multiplier to 16X to get 3.2 GHz without any voltage bump. I thought it was either my memory or Windows Vista 64-bit. I backed the multiplier off to 15X and bumped the FSB up just a notch to end up with about 3.1 GHz and it's stable now! Boy, I was about to pull my hair out. Windows kept crashing and asking for reactivation. Finally it would not activate on-line and even manually. I couldn't even boot into safe mode, so I had to do a system restore using the Vista DVD. Anyway, those bad times are behind me now and I am having a great time playing Call of Duty 4. I still get my butt kicked but at least I get a few of those bad guys first. And I tell you what - the picture and smooth frame rates are excellent.

Here are some pictures to wet your appetites. My son has not yet started painting the side panels but I did get my VGA coolers from Newegg and I have them installed. Temps are around 35 to 40C idle but I don't know how high they are gettng yet. I'm using my main fan controller to set the fan speeds of both GPU's. Forget those automatic software settings.



My new Zalman VF900-cu VGA coolers arrived and it didn't take me long to gather my RAM sinks.

I took the 12 screws out and then had to remove the stock thermal pads. Look at all that thermal goop on the GPU!

It took a while to remove that thermal goop and then I had to figure out how I would attach the RAM sinks. I hope they don't fall off.

The first card took me about an hour because I was being careful. The second card took about 20 minutes. The VGA fans attach directly to my front panel Aerogate I fan controller.

Al the project turned out great.

Thats it, A V P R letters on the front of the case make it a theme project, Sorry nice hardware, But this was a let down for me.

looking good haven't seen AVP-R yet it is not out here in the UK

No, that's not it. Like I've stated earlier, my son is going to paint the side panels with AVP-R graphics. Hopefully it will be complete before January is over.

Also, what about that wallpaper? It's from the AVP-R movie poster!!!

i like the idea of the AVPR on the front, but i hope the graphics spice it up some more.
Is your son an artist or something? :roll:

I would call my oldest son Tom an artist. He's still in school (GMU) and he has about 1.5 years to go for his art degree. His minor is computer science or programming. He's changed majors a few times so it's going to take more than 4 years.

Anyway, I have an example of his work on my home web site (he drew my Big Al's logo). It's at the bottom where I show machines I built from 2000 to 2003. He painted the backside of a motherboard tray with an Unreal character. Here is is again for your viewing pleasure:



But you know what? We haven't decided exactly what pose to paint on each side panel yet. I want one panel to have an Alien creature, and the other panel to have a Predator creature. They don't have to be screen shots from the movie, but a character based on the movie screen shot is more along the theme of the case. If anybody has possible Alien or Predator images that I can look at I sure would be thankful. Please post a few to this thread if you have a way to upload them, or send them directly to me at "scummins (at) cox.net" with either Alien or Predator in the subject line.