You Magnificent Bastard

Monday, June 12, 2006

Whitewitch Build Diary - Prologue

After last year's very successful Prospero build, I'm starting a new casemod for Erica called "Whitewitch", named after the wintery sorceress in C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe:



The casemod follows some hardware upgrades. We moved from her old Athlon XP system to a new system:

ECS KN1 Lite motherboard (socket 939, on-board LAN, PCI-E 16x, etc)
Athlon 64 3200 ("Venice" core, running at a stock 2 ghz right now)
2x512 Patriot RAM dual-channel kit
Zalman "Flower" CPU fan
Antec 350W PSU

Using her old DVDR drive and WD800 EIDE hard drive (80g). It's currently running caseless (nude!) on her desk. With a RADEON X600 we borrowed it runs Oblivion pretty well. Just got it all running today so we haven't tried WoW yet. But we will. Eventually we'll replace that junk with some ridiculous nVidia leaf-blower card.

Anyway, the idea will be a case that harnesses the deep magic of winter's chill to kick out owning framerates. I've picked up a few materials, including some cabinet pulls for LAN-party friendly grab bars (assuming either of us would ever go to a LAN party), a CCDL light kit (in UV) and a can of opalescent spray paint. This mod will concentrate less on a flashy fabrication mod (like Prospero's plasma globe) and more on traditional casemodding - paint effects, internal lighting, case windows and blowholes. This weekend I'll tear down the case and bezel and start with the first few coats of paint. And we're off!