I finished cutting the side of my case for my tonight, and while I am not pleased with the results, it still looks pretty cool. The dragon template that I made turned out to be too detailed for the tools I have so I had to improvise and remove some details.

Here is a picture of the mod finsihed

Now, here is where the weird part comes in. I originally didn't have any internal case lighting, that's when I took the above picture. Then I remembered that I had a 10" long cold cathode that I took from my old scanner. I got the cathode and power supply, but didn't have a power supply for it, so I attached an AC adapter for a Sega Gamegear to the power supply and it worked great. The only problem was that the power lines were uninsulated along the bulb, so I put some electrical tape over them.

Here is a picture of my homebrew lighting

I brought it upstairs to my computer room (about 110 degrees without AC) and proceded to put it in the case for some more pics.

This is the really stupid part!

I didn't have a place to plug the huge AC adapter for the cathode in, so I set about pulling out an unnecessary power cord, which I assumed was the speakers becasue they made a lot of noise when I unplugged it.

I proceded to get ready for some pictures. It took about five minutes to get ready for a picture. I had the camera in my hand and was wiggling the cathode (the one with the partially ininsulated power lines) for better lighting. Suddenly the computer shut off. I was sure that I fried my system with the exposed high volatge lines from the cathode!

I tried to start the system several times only getting into windows and getting an error, then finally decided to check the BIOS, where I immeidetly noticed that my CPU temp was at 78 degrees celcius! This was all after about 10 minutes of running without the pump.

I turns out that my fail-safe WC system with the PAL8045 waterblock actually worked, as the CPU got to 80 Celcius after about 10 minutes my 8K3A+ shut itself off!

Woohoo! My system isn't fried, my WC fail-safe works, and I finsihed my really cool case mod!