Mod of the Month - September 2009

Mod of the Month - September 2009

We've had plenty of reasons to be inspired this month at bit-tech. Plenty of new hardware has passed through our lab such as Intel's new LGA1156 CPUs, some great AMD motherboards and ATI's cool running Radeon HD 5870. We've also had some PCs which have been modded to the extreme turn up as well - more on that soon. Also there has been some fantastic things going on in our modding forums.

We have a true mix of mods and scratch builds this month but we're more impressed than ever with the skill on show in the project logs of our six nominees. We have a wall mounted PC for which modding wasn't restricted to the machine itself but also involved a living room wall. We've got some serious lathe work going on too as well as powder coating, water cooling and copious use of acrylic.

Make sure you check out our forums for the latest updates on this month's nominees as well as countless other great projects and also keep an eye on our case modding features where we hear from the modders themselves who talk us through their fantastic builds.

Our sponsor Quiet PC is on hand again with some generous prizes for the winner of September's Mod of the Month. They'll be giving the winner the choice of one of these three great prizes:

Scythe Kama Connect 2 USB2.0 IDE and SATA External Adapter

The Scythe Kama Connect 2 is an incredibly handy gadget designed to allow you to connect SATA and IDE hard drives quickly and easily to any PC using USB. It is compatible with both 3.5in and 2.5in SATA and IDE hard drives, as well as any other IDE device such as an optical drive. The ability to quickly plug-and-play any hard drive gives you a quick and easy way to access your files or transfer them from one drive to another without needing to open up your PC.

Scythe Mugen 2 Quiet CPU Cooler

This processor cooler is an example of Japanese engineering at its finest! Scythe’s Mugen 2 Quiet CPU Cooler is designed with five fin towers for improved processor cooling by up to 7 degrees C compared with the original Mugen, which itself was one of the best on the market. As you would expect, it is multi-socket compatible for Intel and AMD and comes with full instructions.

Zalman ZM-MFC1 Plus Black Multi Fan Controller

Zalman's ZM-MFC1 PLUS is a very simple fan controller which supports up to six 3-pin fans. This provides the user with total control of the installed fans. Each channel is capable of altering the supplied voltage from 5V to 11V, with 5V able to quieten even the loudest of fans. As well as a reduction in noise, lowering the voltage a fan receives also reduces the airflow, so make sure you keep an eye on the temperatures inside the system.

Again, a huge thanks to Quiet PC. It was another run away win last month with forum regular slipperyskip's Mission racking up more votes than anyone else and claiming the title with his beautiful wooden enclosure. Make sure you check out his case feature, Project Ingraham too. Let's put this show on the road though and with that, here are this month's awesome nominees for MOTM September. Where did 2009 go, eh?

This Month's Contenders

• Project: PURE by subset7
  
• Wall Mount Case by bfelda
  
• λ-Zephyr by woody_294
  
• Ringo's la ultima by ringo
  
• The APOC Project by sebtiger
  
• Project: Seawolf by Javerh