A while ago now RamblingEpic‘s PC started making what can only be described as God-awful noise! It took us a while to narrow down what was causing the issue as it’d come and go, but eventually we noticed that his PSU had split up the side. His graphics card heatsink was also full of dust and the case was an old, kinda crappy one with no fans. It’s been something he’d made do with for a long time until this happened recently.
He’s a no frills kinda guy, so when I’d finally talked him into letting me replace the case and ESPECIALLY the split PSU currently being held together with electrical tape, he had a few requirements. I’d hoped initially for the Antec 300 or something like it, but he preferred no LEDs, no fancy bits in general, just ‘plain & simple’. After recently having a very good experience building with BitFenix using their Shinobi case, I started looking at their budget cases. RamblingEpic set his seal of approval on the Merc Alpha case and away we went!
The job of swapping cases and replacing the old power supply unit took around 2hrs total, mostly due to having to rewire and cable-tidy everything I could. The old PSU was a 400W so we’ve replaced it with a Corsair 430W Builder Series, the same one I used in my server build last month. Altogether, this little mini-project consisted of the following:
Components
BitFenix Merc Alpha Case
BitFenix Spectre 120mm Fan – Black
BitFenix Prebraided Molex to 3pin x3 fan adapter cable – Black
Corsair Builder Series CX 430W V2 ’80 Plus’ Power Supply
