I've been waiting for this day some time now. My Noctua-fans are too big for my old pc-chassis. On all of them. But I got hold of an old pc(1st generation Intel-i7), but the chassis is much bigger than my original chassis(which no longer has any room for changes after installing a a gtx-1080 graphics card .

Noctua-fan sticking out(Linux-server):

Which is the same situation for my Windows desktop machine. Fan sticking out, not enough room:

You can't see the fan from this angle, but you can see the graphics-card aligning with the hard-disks. Not a happy/pleasent situation. Can't close the cabinet because of the fan, and can't close the cabinet because i'm scared it'll overheat.  So we'll cange cabinets today. Here's the plan for today.

  1. Get the junk out of this cabinet. I might make use of some of this in the Linux-server.
  2. Move junk from old desktop-cabinet to propellerhead-cabinet(old cabinet but very nice in size, and solutions for hard-disks)
  3. Move linux server to old desktop-cabinet. Noctua-fan will still not fit, but the cabinet is bigger.

Ok....back to it..If I don't finish off this article today with pictures of my "big day", I've had too many beers. .
Yeah...I'm writing in English today....and I have no idea why...

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OK. So..it's another day. I got finished with one of the pc's. The windows desktop/gaming rig. The operation went very well actually. Nothing out of the ordinary, except for one thing: I broke the plastic casing around the sata-plug on and ssd disc. Not very good. Could still make the disc work but...not good. Here's a pic:

 

The rest of this article will be a picturesque article...

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This is why I need a bigger cabinet:

There's no room anymore. The graphics-card took the last space there was. And I cannot take out the hard-disks without bumping into something or without having to take out some cables. Difficult to work with.

Taking things apart is not a difficult task, and I'm not going to go into details. But one important thing to do when you do this is to mark your hardware. Especially if you do not want to run into problems concerning the cabling and wiring to the hard-disks. I marked all the disk with a number, and I marked my sata-cables with a number(which I left locked on the mainboard). See below:

Mark the disks:

Mark respective cable with the same number:

Usually when you do this kind of thing you will find a fairly amount of dust....(by the way...leave the cables in their sockets so that you do not have to think so much about where they should according to the hardware-configuration.

 

Cleaning this is a no brainer. Even though cleaning is not your thing: Do it. It will lengthen your hardware's life a lot longer. I actually don't have a vaccum cleaner so I use whatever I have in handy. One thing is for sure: If cleaning electronic components, use a a cleaning-spray meant for electronic components like this one:

And make sure you have time and space for doing all of this...it's time and space-consuming and if you have someone else living with you, I'm not sure they'd appreciate the mess :D

 

Ok.....So now everything is cleaned up and ready get a new housing. My housing is actually an old one, but it''s bigger and some of the solutions for cabling and hdd's are much better than my original one. As you can see in the pic below, everything is upside down compared to my old rig:

The powersupply is on the floor and not on top...That's the difference :D...not that much different but ok...a little bit :) On the far right, furthest down is space for harddisks which can be placed in drawers:

Very nice I'd say.

I'm not going to go into details of the building process. It went well. Be careful of static electricity...Here's a couple of pics..of the last moments. New cabinet takes the place of the old:

Start the machine and everythings a-ok.

I didn't have time to build my Linux-server. The reason for this is that there were too many components that were better than on my old Linux-server.

  • Water-coolling.
  • mainboard was better
  • cpu was better i7-930 compared to my i7-920.

And the water cooling did noe fit in my old cabinet so I'll have to make some adjustments. Another time.

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