X500 Evo: Stuffing da beast (Part 3)

Hey guys.

Not many updates these days as I'm still waiting stuff to arrive from overseas :(
One of the things that troubled me was were to put the 4-pin power connector.

As you might saw already, the X500 Evo has a small hole on the back side in order for a normal PicoPSU female power plug connector to be mounted.

Since I use the big PicoPSU 160W with a huge 192W power brick that has a 4-pin power connector I had to find a place to mount it properly without adding extra holes to the case.

After some thinking, I decided to use the little rectangle area above the PCI-E slot which normally was meant for the VGA connector (as most low profile cards have HDMI-DVI connector and a VGA connector to a second backplate via a mini ribbon).

After a lot of research I managed to find some schematics of the power plug so the only thing I wanted was a metal backplate of about 35mm x 15mm with a central hole of 11mm. The extra mounting holes of the power plug, would be drilled after  the power plug was glued to the metal surface for stability.

As always, my good friend Leo (Keropi) made me some metal backplates for testing purposes. Some were from galvanized sheet and others were from inox sheet. You can check the difference on the first 3 backplates (galvanized) comparing to the last one (inox). I chose to use an inox backplate due to it's hardness and better looks (lol).

So I covered all plastic area with instant glue and after it was in place, I inserted the power plug which has a tight fit by default in order to keep it in place tight :)

After some time... PERFECTION!

I realized that the power connector was glued so tight and firm that the extra 2 holes for the screws were obsolete. I of course tried inserting and removing the power plug numerous times without issue.
After I was 100% certain that it holds, I used instant glue to keep the whole inox backplate+powe plug combo in place...

Success!!!
After some time the plug was ready so I wired the power cable accordingly and voila!

Lets see now when the other components will show up :P

Stay tuned.

A4000: Putting all together

After testing my A4000 for quite some time, I was expecting many components to be able to put all the Amiga together permanently (like accelerator spacers, 2.5" to 3.5" IDE adapter).

This Amiga sadly didn't have spacers for the accelerator (since it came with an stock 030@25MHz CPU).
I had 2 spare spacers from my previous A4000 but these were temporary solution since I wanted something more robust that could hold my CSPPC with screws.
Thankfully my friend Justin (JuvUK) sent me freely 4x spacers to use on my beloved accelerator (Man you rock!)

Here they are screwed on the lower side of A4000's motherboard



...and here they are from the upper side of the A4000's motherboard.



Accelerator screwed in it's place permanently (unless I decide to overclock or change the PPC CPU at some point = Stan the man)...



You will also notice in this photo the following:

• 68060 fan being not center aligned on purpose due to the connector of CVisionPPC that requires a bit of space
• PPC heatsink changed with an awesome copper one and a 30x30x10 noiseless fan
• My beloved custom IDE cable that goes under CSPPC and goes right side near the PSU
• The round Floppy cable that I stripped wire-by-wire on hand :)

Awesome airflow and not ugly ribbons all over the CPUs blocking the air (not to mention beautiful sight to watch lol).


This is the metal bracket with all the drives etc. You can clearly see the ACard with it's adapters along with the SCSI Multicarddrives.




After inserting the metal bracket that holds the drives... you can see that I have a really nice view and space even with the tight space that A4000 has.



On the side things get a little more squeezed but take in mine that there is plenty of room for the PSU fan to suck air to the back without cables blocking him.



If you noticed carefully you definitely saw the adapters train on the DVD-RW area :)
To enlighten you a bit the DVD-RW doesn't have anything weird but the custom yellow cable that comes from the IDE header.
The weird train comes from the 2.5" IDE Hard drive that sits under the DVD-RW (as you saw in a previous photo of mine) and consists of...
2.5" HD --> 2.5" to 3.5" IDE adapter --> ACard AEC-7220U --> 50pin to 68pin SCSI adapter and finally the SCSI 68pin cable from CSPPC's chain :)
Just to have better look here's the following pictures...

This is the 2.5" to 3.5" IDE adapter



...and this is the ACard with the 50pin to 68pin SCSI adapter




It's not noticeable that there's a custom mini cable with an male power connector that is soldered to the ACard and gives power to the 2.5" to 3.5" adapter. I forgot to take a picture of that but it was really need not to have another one power connector floating around :)

A view from the top can show you perfectly how it's all arranged together...



I'm pretty happy about how everything fitted without problems and that I haven't had to put extra money into acquiring an ACard!
This ACard was taken from my A1200 that from now on will be with her Idefix Express :) Sorry sister, my needs are huge...
I won't need to get an UW ACard in the future for the simple reasons that it's a lot bigger and won't fit as nice as this, and it's expensive not to have to think about it lol.

Just to see how well my ACard performs on the CSPPC's SCSI interface here's a photo of SysSpeed... 18.3MB/s yeah! \o/



Not bad for an SCSI-II interface (ACard AEC-7220U) don't you think?

More soon to come :)