Plexcase 6            August 2002

 

The fans that will be going in the system are made by Antec. Oh...and they're clear to match the case too. There will be two of them in the motherboard section of the case. One will bring in cool air while the other will be blowing out the hot air from the opposite side of the case. There is something else about these fans that I'll tell you about later. These fans are 80mm X 80mm X 20mm and put out 31CFM of air. The noise level is very low so it shouldn't be like I'm next to an airport. 

What I'm doing is taking off the 4 wire Molex connector and putting on a 3 wire connector that will attach to the motherboard. This motherboard has four fan headers: one for the CPU fan, one for the fan on the North bridge, and two more for whatever you want to hookup to them. In my case, the two Antec fans will be modified for these 3 wire connectors to be attached to the other fan headers.
 

 

 

After I cut the existing wire in two, I measured how much of the fans wire was to be used. Then the wires from both fan and 3 wire connector were stripped. The black colored piece is what came on the fan so I thought I would use it. It's a braded nylon wire cover and it looks cool so that's why I decided to keep it. Add some heat shrink tubing (red pieces on the fan wires), put on the wire cover, then add some blue heat shrink tubing over the wire cover (not shown) and solder the two wires  together. 
 

 

 

Put a little heat to the heat shrink tubing and this is what it looks like when I got done. Now the fan wire is just the right length and is nice and neat.
 

 

 

Here you can see where the fans will be going along with the CD-ROM drive. The group of smaller holes are for the front panel buttons on the motherboard. The bottom two are for the on, reset buttons and the top two are for the hard drive and power on LED's (Light Emitting Diode).
 


 

While the soldering iron is still hot, let's go and check out how I did the front panel for the motherboard.

 

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