VGX-XL Redux

[sinful]

The VGX overhaul that I have been working on is nearing completion. I just received my final piece from production and just waiting on some replacement fans to arrive, but I figured I would post a peek of the progress done so far.

The Bottom is a picture of the new fan box. I chose to bump out the rear fans so that with some custom panel mount cables I will be able to relocate needed ports to the extra card slots near the power supply.

I'll post an update and many more pictures when the project is finished.

[jwa4]

Excellent work, can't wait to see more!

Thanks
John

[Oliver]

Very interesting project, Looking awesome, good job!

[sinful]

Update: I finished all of the chassis work, she is pretty much done aside from a few odd jobs.

I call it the VGX-XL7, it was my fourth design that I settled on. My first design was a complete swap of all internal parts without making any chassis mods. I was interested to see if I could get my new build to fit within the most powerful VGX-XL requirements. The rear fans were deleted. My second design never made it beyond paper, it would have had a series of 40mm fans in the rear and a cutout for the I/O plate. My third design is where the new card slots came in. It would have had the 40mm rear fans but no I/O plate, instead the needed ports would be relocated to the extra card slots with internal cables.

The motherboard was really simple to fit in. It lined up with a couple of the original standoffs and lined up the GPU card nicely with the original card slot, the standoffs that didn't match up were removed and aftermarket standoffs were used in the new locations.

The power supply used is a Silverstone 450w SFX Modular power supply. The new PSU originally didn't fit so nicely in the case, so was gutted and the internals were place in a new fabricated PSU box that while still maintaining all the usefulness of being modular was made a little larger and rearranged to make for a perfect drop in replacement. The wire harnesses included with the new PSU were to short so new longer custom sleeved wire harnesses were used.

The original I/O panel was simple to remove, just requiring a few rivets to be drilled out. Replacing the I/O panel is a custom fabricated card slot Panel made to hold up to 7 low profile cards.

The area for the rear fans was cut out and the fans were extended outward and enclosed with a fabricated fan box. Enough room was left between the fans and the I/O ports on the motherboard to allow for cables to relocate them to the new card slots.

The original IR and RF receivers were able to be reused after an exchange of the connectors for a USB header connector.

A 80mm front fan was added just behind the IR and RF Receivers.

She Idles pretty cool , at 29*C about 9*C above room temp with all of the fans turned as low as they will go using the motherboards Tuning utility, I was a little surprised considering the CPU is a 130w Six-core powerhouse and its shelved inside of a large server rack with a thick glass door with a Denon receiver and several 200 disc changers. Under heavy load the temps hit about 49*C leaving some headroom for overclocking. Without the rear fans she idled right around 34*C and under load would peak at 54*C. The Fans I used are a little on the loud side so will be replaced with some quite Noctua fans. Eventually I will get around to adding the rear I/O cables. I intended on adding a Slot load Blu-ray drive and a lot more ram but I went over budget on my CPU when I decided on i7 4930k six-core CPU over the much cheaper 4820 quad-core. Having to make new PSU cables wasn't on the list of things to do either. With the 3 changers I have hooked up the lack of an internal drive isn't a problem and the rear I/O cables will happen soon enough.

I tried to make all of the fabricated parts look as professional as possible just incase I decide to make them available to others. The PSU and PSU box may make for a viable alternative to an original that has gone bad or in need of more watts. The modular design would allow for a 24 pin to 18 pin cable, just a matter of finding a pinout guide for the original 18 pin motherboard.

[Oliver]

Nice work mate, this is certainly the most powerful VGX-XL I've ever seen.
Looking inside your machine it's easy to see the quality of the parts installed, that along with the cooling fans will be why it is so cool.
I particularly like the new custom card slot and PSU box, the PSU is a real pain to replace or upgrade, not for you anymore
I have a pin out guide for the original motherboard somewhere, I see if I can find it.

I would like to ask, how quiet or noisy is it after the mods, hopefully its still quiet enough to use as a media centre.

Thanks for sharing this with us sinful, its a very interesting project.

[Oliver]

All credit for this original PSU pin guide goes to our moderator, jwaiv.
I hope it helps some people

[sinful]

Right now she is a little on the noisy side, not noisy like a jet engine but still somewhat distracting. The added front fan doesn't really add to the noise given its locations buried inside of the case but the rear fans are the loud ones. The fans I picked up weren't as quite as I had hoped, so I ordered a pair of Noctua fans that I have experience with. The noctua fans can go all the way down to around 7-8dbs compared to the 20db rosewill fans that are in it now. It still works really well for as a media machine and to be honest if I didn't use it for gaming as well, I would have not even bothered putting in the rear fans.

Thanks for the pinout, next time I'm feeling bored maybe I will try to whip up and adapter. As soon as this project is all finished I figured I would try to stuff all of the original XL2 parts into a standard ATX Case so that guide might just come in handy.

[sinful]

Update:

I switched out the loud Intel cooler for a Noctua NH-L12. The added front fan size was increased to a Noctua 92mm PWM fan. All other fans are 80mm Noctuas including the PSU fan. A UJ-265 BDXLR/W slot load drive was installed and the rear USB and Firewire ports were finished. Also added to the mix was an internal USB hub.

She is as silent as can be. The temps have increased a little but are well within an acceptable range unless I run prime95 for an hour then she heats up to around 75C. I nabbed my brother's HD7750 to test a pair HD7750s in crossfire which seemed to be working pretty well, so I may pick up a second card to run in crossfire for the meantime while I redesign the card slots to fit something beefier like a 780ti

[gladiateur555]

Very nice work! You open the CPU to replace the fan by a Noctua? The stock fan of the CPU is not quite as the original VAIO PSU?

[sinful]

The silverstone power supply came with a slim 80mm fan. I figured since I'm already building a new power supply box I might as well make it fit a full size fan.

[superhyrbel]

Hi, I am very impressed of your great work!

I am also planning a reconstruction of my 301 but I don`t know much about ordering the right and Fitting parts.

Would you be so kind to give a short overview of the specs of parts you used. Especially specs of cards, cabels, cooling, motherboard, connectors, drive, power supply and so on... would be interessting.

Thank you in advance for your work.

I like to build a powerfull machine and I am not saticfied with the maximum upgrade keeping the board.

Perhaps anybody else knows about parts and I am sure there are many out there with the same wish.

Thanks a lot!

Greets

[sinful]

Already ahead of ya. Here's a guide I wrote.

forum.vgx-xl.com/thread/266/vgx-xl-redux-project

If you have further questions after reading this feel free to ask.