Installation - Cont'd

The pictures below illustrate the final arrangement for my case.  The large bracket has little feet on it that will slide over an open PCI slot, but try as I might, I wasn't able to get the bracket to live happily in my case in any of the PCI slots.  I had to put the bracket in the very top slot, above the AGP area, in order to get all the stuff to coexist with other cards, etc.  I tried every possible configuration, and the only place it could go was encasing my video card.  This struck me as odd, because without the support of a PCI slot under it, the bracket kind of sags under the weight of the fans. I fixed this problem by hurriedly fabricating an aluminum bracket in the shop.  I know, the workmanship of the support bracket is sub-par, but by the time I was finished, the project had been going on for an hour at least and I was getting impatient. At some point, I'll make a nicer one.  If you have a nice video card that you want to show off, it is likely to get buried under all the fans, so take note. I'm also not a fan of chrome fan grills unless the fan is exposed to the outside of the case.  Until they start having safety inspections at LAN parties, I'm going to leave them off.

I'm not real crazy about the final arrangement as far as airflow is concerned.  It's no doubt blasting a lot of air onto the video card, which is good, but I'm not sure that it contributes to better overall case flow.  The fan on the end of the big bracket is helping to pull air through the drive cage, which is good, but then it gets trapped in the PCI slot area.  I'm sure it finds its way out eventually, but I would have rather had it helping to move air through to the exhaust fan already in the case.  Swirl is good, too though, so I'm not worried about it actually harming overall case temps.

Once I got all the mechanical hookups configured, I set about attaching the electrics.  I took some time to rearrange some other cables (especially the monster ATX power cable I have).  The wires on the fans have three connectors, but not surprisingly the harness provided to hook them up does not pass-through the speed-sensing wires of the fans.  I'm sure this is because you can't collect the fan speed wires into one bundle like you can the power wires.  Your motherboard or fan controller will need three dedicated circuits to read them all. If you do elect to hook the fans to another source of power, you'll probably have to extend them to reach a fan controller, as the individual leads aren't very long.

Here are a few shots of the completed installation.