One of my minor mission i wanna complete in this sem is mod my casing. What i had in mind is adding a few LED/UV fan, do some cable management, stick some florescent stickers and add a pair of UV CCFL or normal CCFL.
Today I brought my PC back from hostel and decided to do a major cleaning inside the casing. Since my CM Elite 333 has washable mesh in the front panel, I can proudly say the interior of my casing is as good as new. (Or almost.. =P)
1st of all, I use a cotton bud together with my torch light, I try to look for dust at the corners of my motherboard and casing. After that, I took out my graphic card and give it a good clean up especially the dust around the fan fins and case. I resitting the HSF of the graphic card and give a good clean of it. Of course, these are done with proper precaution and static charge free.
After removing GC, notice the stock CM fan at the rear 
After cleaning my graphic card, I then took out the CM stock fan which is included in the casing. As expected, the amount of dust of the fan is less compared to my old PC where the dust are sticky and a thick layer is formed on it. Easily I cleaned the fan and keep it aside.
Here comes the highlight of the cleaning today. Cleaning the mesh in the front panel is not an easy job. I need to remove the front panel from the casing and remove the wire mesh in order to take out the sponge mesh.
Procedure to take out the mesh
- Remove the front panel by pulling it from the opening below. Pull slowly and you will notice the 6 pins will slowly shrink into the hole and the panel will come out.
- Carefully place the front panel on an item because the wires wont allow u to pull it too far away.
- Now, you will notice the wire/metal mesh openings located around the plastic case. Refer to the picture attached.
- Then slowly and gently bend the metal fingers upwards so that it can slip through the openings.
- There are 11 "metal fingers" located around the plastic case. Some fingers are very short and u might need a pliers to do so. Be careful not to scratch the exterior metal.
- Slowly push the metal outwards and the whole thing will simply drop out and u will see clouds of dust poofing up. LOL
- Remove the other metal bars for the ROM bays and A drive bays.
- Wash all the mesh and dry it under the sun.
- After the mesh are dried, place it back to the metal bars and slot it back to the openings and secure it by bending the fingers down as what u seen before u remove them.
- Fix the front panel back to casing and the procedure ends here.
After that, I went out to COD with a LYN member because I bought a new fan from him, which is a 120mm Xigmatek LED fan. It cost me RM25 but I think it is a reasonable price to pay for a nice fan. It is black in colour with 4 white LED and a air flow of 61 CFM at 1500rpm.
After installing it into my casing, it pretty much looks like this below. Quite a silent fan with a considerable high air flow. The LED lights are deflected by the rotation of fan, so it is not very visible from the side, but I can say it is very nice..
With lights on
With lights off
Closer view Processor
Idle: 40°C --> 38°C
Load: 52°C --> 47°C
Hard Disk
44°C --> 35~37°C
GPU
Idle: 56°C --> 50~51°C
Load: 64~66°C --> 58°C
Motherboard
40°C --> 37°C
Overall, the reason of the big difference of the temperature is due to the air flow. By adding a fan in the front panel, blowing air directly across the hard disk and part of the graphic card, increases the air flow for the lower part of the casing. Even thou my GC is a dual slot cooling type, some hot air are accumulated below the casing, thus causing a high idle temperature at 56°C. By altering the air flow, the temperature drop as much as 6°C!! Which is huge improvement by just adding a fan. I guess I achieve better result by replacing the front stock fan with a high performance one. Will consider it in the future.
The next thing I wanna do is adding CCFL to it.. Let's look forward to it then..
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