Create Your Own Illuminated Rear IO - DIY Project
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
1,730 words · ~8 min read
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so today's video is a little bit different it's one that was inspired by
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basically my frustration i mean i'm the kind of person who whenever i'm giving
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my case a reach around
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ah funny right anyway whenever i'm plugging
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anything into its backside
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i like to be able to see what i'm doing and the problem with most cases is that
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they simply don't have a way in a dark room i mean
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obviously we've got studio lights in here right now so it's kind of a bad
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example but in a dark room to see what the heck you're plugging into where so
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this is a quick and easy diy solution to
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that problem also i'm supposed to tease we're going to have a hard pipe water
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cooled build log coming up pretty soon so stay tuned for that
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Corsair h80i gt and h100i gtx liquid
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coolers improve both the appearance and the cooling performance of your pc click
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on my chest hey look i have a Corsair logo on my shirt click on that to learn
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more about them all right so the first thing we've got to do in this video is go down on our
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pcs alright so i'm gonna get down here on
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all fours and uh
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show you guys what the problem usually is so you can see back here there's uh
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well for one thing i'm tethered to the wall by this whole room liquid cooling
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setup thing so let's go ahead and
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detach here all right there we go
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nzxt cases have a feature that i've been saying forever
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every case should have and that's they have a little led in the top right here
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and then they have another one down here that illuminates all the rear i o so the
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very least even if you can't really get your head in there you can you can kind
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of you know as long as you can see what you're doing before you dive in then
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you'll at least know what it is exactly that you're dealing with well
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again i i don't understand why more manufacturers don't do this and i was
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looking for a simple solution since obviously this is not an ntxt case and
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as usual amazon has the answer trust me they've
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got all kinds of stuff on amazon.com this one in particular is an led strip
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and i wasn't actually looking for quite
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as much of a pre-done solution as this i thought that i was going to have to buy
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just a strip of leds and that i was going to have to figure out how to well
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not figure out so much it's pretty easy they've got solder points on them just
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like that i was going to have to hook up some kind of a power source and then
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solder it to the positive and negative terminals but actually i ended up
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finding one that was a extremely inexpensive and b even had a usb
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connector right on it now before you do something like this it's really
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important to bear in mind that you cannot use just any old leds 12 volt
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leds which are the more uh the more standard voltage that leds you buy
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online or wherever else you're going to run at won't work for exactly what we're
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doing here now you could power 12 volt leds off of a computer in fact most of
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the leds on your cooling fans or on the
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strips that you run inside your case are going to be 12 volt leds but the reason
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we need 5 volt is because i wanted the
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here we go i wanted our led strips to run regardless of whether the system is
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powered on or not so we're going to go ahead we're going to just kind of figure
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out exactly where this is going to go and we're
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going to show you guys a quick before and after here
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i'm just gonna all you do is cut it off at the length
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that you want so you'll see it's clearly marked with little uh with little cut
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marks so we're gonna go ahead and i don't have scissors on me so i guess
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we're using a knife oh
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well i'm reaching there grab that out now that's nice
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okay oh cut relatively easily now we have
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some extra leds left over in case we ever wanted to do something like this again it's important again to note that
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they're five volt leds now we're gonna go ahead
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take the adhesive off the back i'll have this linked in the video description you
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guys often complain that i never say how much things cost in my videos and the
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reason is that it's always linked in the video description all you have to do is
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click well and then click and then click again
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yeah the price always changes
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except for uh for me always a dollar
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all right let's go ahead and get that baby in there
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all right now you're going to want to watch out you don't want to accidentally make it so that you can't get at your
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usb ports or anything so i'm going to oops
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you know it's not the stickiest adhesive i've ever seen
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so i'm gonna try and get it in there as much as i can i'll get you guys a better view of this uh probably after
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which raises the question why bother recording it now at all well i don't
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know i'm a youtuber i just record everything
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it's for austerity
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all right so we're going to run this all down the side of our top i o there
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and then we're actually going to come out a little bit this is important
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because we don't want this interfering with the
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screws
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here we go and then we're going to run right down
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the very edge here there we go all right so we've got it
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running all down this side here i would recommend normally turning your system
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off anytime you're making modifications to it now
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we're gonna do a little bit of now i would normally want to shorten this
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uh wire if i was gonna plug it in directly but i'm actually gonna show you
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something i'm gonna do that's a little bit different after we're going to plug this in
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and just like that
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amazing our i o
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is illuminated and suddenly we are happy people that is some really
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terrible adhesive on on this led strip i would recommend
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replacing that with something else that is that is just horrendous
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now the coolest thing about this and the main reason that we went with 5
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volt power instead of 12 volt power is
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this i'm going to shut down the computer
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because let's face it a lot of the time
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when you're trying to plug something into the back of a computer it will not be on
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so the reason 5 volt is important instead of 12 volt is that 12 volt does
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not run while the system is not
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powered on whereas 5 volt our system is actually
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off and the only way to get the light to turn off
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is to actually power down the system outright power down the power supply
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even so you can see i turn on the power supply boom now i can plug everything
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easily without without any difficulty then if you don't want to plug into the
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back of your computer there's actually one step further you can take it and
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we're going to go ahead and show you guys why i didn't shorten the length of
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this wire before so this is a cool little doodad that we
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featured on our handy tech under 100
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series not that long ago i'm just going to go ahead and kind of
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cable manage that somewhat decently there we go
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that is going to make it
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so we can plug this into a usb header internally it goes from
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a four pin connector like this to a female usb connector
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so we plug that bad boy in plug that in there
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close it up and there you have it
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so i think that pretty much wraps this up guys uh let us know if you like this
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kind of a format this is something a little bit different that we're doing we always want to want to hear from you
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let's turn the computer on just make sure i haven't completely ruined it by
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now and like this video if you liked it dislike it if you thought it sucked
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leave a comment uh especially leave a comment at the linked forum thread in
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the video description that is where we would like more people coming and
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commenting are you laughing because you're looking at my nose or something no this is an uncomfortable position oh
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also linked in the video description we have um where to buy like cool t Linus
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tech tips t-shirts like this one uh where you can give us a monthly contribution if you love our videos and
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you want us to make more of them uh where you can change your amazon
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bookmarked one with our affiliate code so we get a small kickback whenever you buy stuff like oh i don't know five volt
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led strips on amazon.com and i think that pretty much wraps it up although
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i'm not entirely sure i had actually brought up all of my talking points for
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this video on the screen before i went and shut down my computer so i think
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i'll pretty much have to sign off thanks for watching and as always if you haven't subscribed already then go ahead
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and mash that button