One thing I'd never thought about before was the plastic melting while I cut it. I was so surprised to get to the end of a 150mm straight cut only to find the off-cut not falling off as expected - practically the whole of the length had welded back together again. The best way round this was to cut a few millimetres then pullback keeping the blade running so it could be cooled by the air then pushing on with a couple more mm. I did the odd bit of tidying with the dremel and found that the molten Perspex spraying of hurts quite a bit when it lands on your arms - something to consider if you work with this material.

So anyway, I got my plain rectangular sheet. Time to mount the fan in it. I cut the 80mm hole by the usual means: drawing two diagonals on the masking tape to get the centre of the sheet, using this centre to mark a circle radius 40mm with a compass. Then drill a hole in the centre big enough for the jigsaw blade to go through. Finally, get on with the jigsaw starting at this hole - with the above Perspex melting precautions.

There aren't many pictures to show of this part of the job. In fact there are none now that I come to think about it. I thought I took some but maybe I just got carried away with the mod and forgot. There were a few "technical faults" in the camera department.

So then I drilled the holes for the fan mounting screws. They were too small and when I tried to enlarge them, the drill bit tried to tear rather than cut so a few shards of Perspex shattered off - one of them into my eye. That was an interesting 5 minutes but I still seem to have perfect vision. (Spode: Did anyone else cringe at the thought of this?)

Next problem: fan screws too short. Those self-taping screws for mounting fans - I only had one long enough to go through fan grille+5mm Perspex and tap into the fan housing. So eventually I found a matching set of nuts and bolts lying around and finished.

The quieter 80mm pushed a lot less airflow in the case than the 120mm did. But AsusProbe using the on-die diode in my XP1600 says my temps have gone from 49C load to 51C load, perfectly acceptable, with a 4 degree rise in ambient case temperature. And it's loads quieter and looks a damn sight neater.

This concludes the front window mod. Now I'm waiting on some internal lighting components and eventually a side window kit. My last cold cathode went into disuse a few months ago and eventually got trodden on because I left it lying around - learn from my mistake :(

Stuart Ladd

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