Guest: Craig "Tech Daddy" Tate
Host: Michael Johnson - PodTech

Michael Johnson - PodTech
This is Michael Johnson, and on today's NVIDIA Podcast, we talk with Craig "Tech Daddy" Tate, one of the top computer modders in the country. This is the first of a two part Podcast with Tate, and I began by asking him about modding. What it is and how one gets a name or a handle?

Craig "Tech Daddy" Tate
Handles are normally used by people so that -- it's kind of an online alias. You don't want to put your real name out there for security purposes obviously, and some people just like to have kind of an alter ego, so a lot of people will find a name or a handle that they'll create, that they think kind of personifies how they handle themselves online. My particular name was kind of a -- it took me a couple of years to come up with it. I ran through a couple of different, various online nicknames, and some people might recognize me by McCain or CBS McCain, and that was all from old gaming days. Then I started realizing that, you know my future and what I'm wanting to do online was more along the lines of education, instruction, troubleshooting, and then I got into modding, and then I became a father, gave birth to my kids and I started realizing that the same principles that I'm applying to what I'm wanting to do online is the same thing I'm doing to my kids, being kind of a dad to them. I'm a huge freak for technology, I mean, if it's got wires in it, I'm just entranced and gearing the headlights. So I just got thinking about technology and being a father, and "Tech Daddy", and it just kind of came from that, and it stuck. A lot of people now recognize me by that online alias, so it just kind of evolved and it's been a successful one.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
That's a great story Craig. Can you tell us a little bit about what modding is and what it is not?

Craig "Tech Daddy" Tate
When modding first started many years back, it was -- there's two camps that say, some people were jealous about what Apple was doing, and other people were just wanting to get more airflow and cooling performance out of their PCs. Obviously the airflow and the cooling, more fan, higher RPM fans, cutting windows, so that you could get more circulation. Other people decided to take it to an aesthetic level, and to make PCs more a personal extension of who they were, kind of like a little thumbprint, because each mod is really unique. What it actually has become is kind of a melding of the two. How to get the most performance out of a machine and looked at doing it. I mean a lot of people will perform mods that are kind of heck, just to get by, and to get the performance out of the way, but for real, in my book, and everybody is subject to their opinion, in my book, real modding comes out whenever you try and meld and blend the two. You try and blend the performance category in with the aesthetic category, and make the two of them work together towards some sort of a common visual flash performance goal, and that's kind of the way I take it on all my machines.

Now everybody has to start somewhere, and whenever you first get into it, it might, modding might just be changing out the fans on your PC to put in some LED fans, or put in some cathode fans, or maybe putting in a UV cold cathode tube, so that it makes any bright colors on your motherboard stand out, I mean you all start somewhere. So modding is just changing the physical of your machine to make it more of a personal extension of you. It can go anywhere from lights and fans, all the way up to complete, complete, I mean like from the ground up, building your own frame, and making your own computer case, something that -- not even buying an ATX Case off the shelf. You build your own case and you cut your own holes. It takes a lot of engineering to do that. It's kind of like, to steal from Lucas. It's kind of like building your own lifesaver. That's kind of the ranking system among a lot of modders. Have you built your own machine from the ground up yet? That's usually reserved for some of the more elite people, but modding covers a lot of areas. It starts from the simple stuff and it can move all the way up to the most extreme custom-case builds that will just boggle your mind.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
It sounds like there is a few levels of it out there as well. So, why don't you tell me what first got you interested in PCs, and taking them sort of beyond what everybody gets out of the box when it arrives on their doorstep?

Craig "Tech Daddy" Tate
Well, I come from the, as I alluded to earlier, there are kind of two people, two different camps in regards to modding, and some people were performance freaks and others were kind of jealous of the aesthetics that Apple was putting into some of their stuff. I kind of came from that camp, I got tired of looking at just base boxes. Everybody was selling the same thing, just re-branded, maybe a little bit different case, but it was either white or it was beige, ooh, wow, its black. I just got bored of seeing the same thing. I started looking around, and had a friend of mine one time that had spray-painted his case with a fleck stone, it made it look like it was a piece of granite, and this was many, many years ago, and I was just awestruck. Why hadn't I thought about that, a simple paint job could just really change the whole attitude of a case. Then I got to thinking more about it and I did some really rudimentary things around the house, experimenting on some really old cases that I had laying around.

Then I started looking around online, and I found a couple of enthusiast websites, and modding was just kind of starting, and I started getting a little bit more excited about it, seeing that there were other tech heads out there like me that were trying to make their cases more, I don't know more beautiful, more sexy, I'll even go as far as to say that, because technology, this is kind of the whole -- this generation, it's kind of like what being a Grease Monkey was back in the 70s. You're always out there with the hood up on your Camero, tinkering around in your engine, trying to eat that little bit of performance out, so you can go out and smoke that guy. This is kind of the same thing. You get your PC home, you have all the parts, you start putting it together and you start thinking, no, I want to make, I want to tweak this part and make it go faster.

That's kind of where everything has evolved on me. I had gotten bored with building just plane machines, and I felt the need to extend kind of an artistic side. I'm a frustrated artist, vocal performance major, and I've got an artistic side, and I'm like, I need to find a way to put my artistic side in with this totally logic based computer side, and there is plenty of -- bunch of other people out there like me that want to make their PCs more visually enticing.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
So does that extend to any other thing around your house? I mean, there is a lot of stuff that sort of is, works on the gray-box theory there. What about cars, TVs, scouting your kids?

Craig "Tech Daddy" Tate
My kids, I'm mod on my kids. The funny one that I just got finished doing is, I'm in a cast right now, I just got finished going through surgery, and I've been limping around on this black fibreglass cast, and I was out in the garage, just this last weekend, and I was working on, I was practicing my airbrushing techniques, trying to get mixed ratios down, and what airbrush needle works best with what type of paint. I looked down at my cast and I was like, "Screw it". I grabbed the template and I went to town and put a whole bunch of tribal flames all over my cast, and I got people complementing about my cast, and how I need to start working at hospital there brushing people casts. No, but I mean I'm also going to be -- I'm going to be building Home Theater PC, that's going to be a modded machine. I don't really tinker much with TVs, because I don't know enough about them. I know that if you reach back, behind a TV and you grab the wrong part, it could really knock you for a loop. I know enough to stay clear of it. The parts, like my one and only car, I'm eyeballing that thing too, right now. It's a Mitsubishi Montero Sport, I keep looking at it, and my wife keeps beating me off with a broom, "get away from it".

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Craig, maybe you can tell me about some of the mistakes you've made along your journey as a modder, and anything that you can maybe point out for first time modders, stuff for them to watch out for?

Craig "Tech Daddy" Tate
Main thing, the first timers need to be really cautious and conscientious of is, being patient. When you get impatient, you do silly and stupid things, you use tools you shouldn't be using to get results that can be unexpected at best, at worst, they can be dangerous. Using a tool improperly, you could hurt yourself, you could hurt the machine, you hurt the equipment you're working on, you could hurt the tool. I mean there's lots of different, really bad outcomes, but the key is just to be patient. There's a saying that we have in the modding community and that's to measure twice and cut once. That goes for pretty much any building groups of job there, but being patient is the main thing I tell them. The other thing that I try and coach people on, especially if the person is doing their first machine, is be realistic.

If you're doing your first machine, and you don't have a lot of tools, and you don't have a lot of resources, don't look at, like what I have done with BOSS, or maybe what Zapwizard did, what he's -- some of the stuff he's done, or maybe some stuff that like G-gnome and some of the other larger modders in a community have done. Don't try and do that on your first modd, try and set yourself up for success, and do the things that you know you can do, that you can attain. Each mod you do, you want to try and reach out a little bit further on the next one, or you want to try and do something that you haven't done or that you haven't seen others do, and figure out a way of making it work. You don't want to start off sprinting if you don't know how to walk first.

So, the thing I try and tell people, mainly is, be patient, don't, don't do -- don't work mad, don't work angry, because then you just make really bad errors. Try and be attainable and enjoy the modding journey as it is. If you set yourself up for a project that's too daunting, you'll get burnt out and you won't want to do it, or you won't finish it, and then you've got this half completed computer that's staring at you, pissing you off everyday when you look at it. You end up getting even more mad and then you end up get turned off, and you don't want to do it. Modding is a lot of fun; it's a lot of fun. It's a commitment. It can be frustrating, but the end result of having a machine that nobody else in the world has, and that you can say you built, is the feeling that I wouldn't trade for the world. Mistakes that I've made in the past, on BOSS I actually had a power supply mod that I planned on putting in, it was going to be a power distribution centre and it was too aggressive, it was too aggressive.

I wasted a $150 power supply and $75 in parts on something that's still sitting in my garage in pieces. I didn't have enough time to implement it properly. The way I had engineered it, I engineered it in a rush, there I go breaking my first rule, and because I engineered my solution in a rush, I ordered the wrong parts, and because I ordered the wrong parts, I couldn't do what I needed to do. I lost a couple of days trying to force the parts to work, and didn't work, so I'm waiting on the right opportunity to use the parts that I've purchased, and the power supply that's laying in pieces in my garage.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Well one of the kind of coolest and certainly most talked about after market upgrades for PCs is water cooling. Now, is that something that you tried, and what do you think about, what most people would think of as kind of shocking, is to put water in your PC. It kind of seems, kind of seems kind of intuitive.

Craig "Tech Daddy" Tate
It does, it does, because you're dealing with a lot of electricity and you're dealing with a lot of power coursing around, and of course when you say water cooling, the first word out of your mouth is water, water and electricity don't mix. Water cooling has come a long way. Initially it was guys using fish tank pumps or pumps that they were swiping, and things that were set up for, like ponds outside that home depot would have and stuff like that. People started getting more into it and manufacturers started responding. The kits have come a long way. There's still a certain amount of skill that's required to properly implement a water cooling solution. You get better performance, almost 95% of the time, using water cooling over air, depending on what you're preparing it against. The main thing is that with water cooling is, you have additional weight, because its obviously water, you have your coolant, it's going to add a couple of pounds to the case, and it makes it a little bit more difficult to move, so if you're a heavy land party person, you want to really give serious consideration in planning to how you want to implement your water cooling solution.

I would not recommend making an external reservoir or an external cooling if you have hoses that go to, say something that sits to the side of your case. Obviously you're going to want to have something that's all inclusive. You're going to want to have your pump, your reservoir, your lines and your radiators, all within the case, so that if you are going to move, and you are going to a land party, you can pick the whole thing up at once and move it all at once. There's a couple of guys I've seen that have done that really well. Spider, a guy that's in Austin Modders group that I mod with, he has got a great Half Life 2 case. He's got a coolant, water cooling system that's actually really modded well into the top of the unit, and he goes to land parties all the time and he doesn't have any problems. The other great thing about water cooling is, it's silent. When you're dealing with air cooling components, when you've dealing with heat sinks, you're dealing with exhaust fans, you're dealing with chipset fans, and all those fans buzzing inside your case can be distracting. With water cooling properly installed, and with a little bit of acoustic mat below the pump, it's virtually silent. It's a great cooling solution.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
Do you use a water cooling system for your graphics cards?

Craig "Tech Daddy" Tate
No, not right now. I've got a water cooling system, that I actually won, that's out in the garage, it's waiting on one of my next mods to do, but all of my stuff has been air cooled up to this point, until I get into that, that new water cooling system that I have got in the garage. It's just been one of the things that I haven't had time, I wanted to, oh, I'm dying to get into it, but I've to kind of rein myself in, and don't get myself involved in too many projects. Finish up my friend's case, finish up the Dallas Star's Case, then I can focus on the case that I want to build, and that next one is probably going to be water cooled.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
So, when you're building a PC with -- you've got water coolings, multiple drives, graphic cards, we're talking about lot of cables, lot of electronics, a lot of stuff running all over the place, do you have any tips or advice about how to run cables in an SLI PC.

Craig "Tech Daddy" Tate
One of the things, like you just touched on, is just the absolute cable mess and management. One of the tips that I do, and I see a lot of other people do it is, you install your power supply and then you run the lines that you know you need, and anything else that you don't need, like if you're on an AMD, you don't need the Intel motherboard power headers. Or if you're on a Intel, you don't need the AMD motherboard power headers. Maybe you don't need all of the four pin hard drive Molex leaf that come with all of these power supplies. There is usually space behind the motherboard to where, if you can get the cables pulled up and zip tie them towards the top of the case, you can easily route them back behind the motherboard. If there is not enough space behind the motherboard tray, usually on the backside of the five and a quarter inch base, if you take off the back panel of your computer, there is usually space there on the back side that you can zip tie cables, and get them out of the way. It makes for much cleaner environment on the inside, it makes for airflow.

The other thing that I like to do is actually, I'll hide all of my cables out of the way, and then I'll build me a custom strand of Molex leaves, so that I don't have a bunch of extra flat cables mowing out. I'll actually build, I'll buy me the cabling, the 18 gauge or 16 gauge wire, and run it into Molex's that I custom buy, and build my own cabling, and then patch that in with a little female Molex power septical, and just patch it into one of my bands of cables that I've hidden in the back, and then it just cleans everything up. Other companies like Lizardtree out of Canada, they make spiral cable wraps that just rock my world. You can put them around water cooling tubes, and if you're routing your water cooling tubes, you don't want to bend the tubes too much or else they'll kink, and then that will reduce the flow of the coolant running through them.

If you put springs on the outside of them, it helps to maintain the outside, the outer diameter integrity of the two, when it keeps them from kinking. So, you can put springs on the outside of your water cooling tubes, and Lizardtree has just ton of color options. You can get UB reactive, you can get black, you can get white, you can get, just about any color of the rainbow. I actually use them also for wrapping around my custom cable brakes that I make. There's lots of little tricks that you can use, but the main thing is just to take the cables that you don't need, and either tuck them into the top of the case, tuck them into the back of the case behind the five and a quarter inch base, or ideally find the way to tuck them behind the motherboard tray, if you have enough space.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
I want to ask you, what's the coolest thing that you've seen done to a PC that you haven't done yet?

Craig "Tech Daddy" Tate
Man, that's a good one. There's a guy out of Australia, his name is Defiant (ph). There's something in the water, because two of my favorite modders in the world are actually out of Australia. One of them is Defiant, and the other one's name is G-gnome. Defiant has this style of working with only Hewlett Packard cases, all HP Pavilion cases, and he is an acrylic master and really does a spectacular job, and he's done a whole series using nothing but HP Pavilion cases. He has done like five or six mods, and they're beautiful, they're really eye catching, and they're beautiful to look at, and they're -- some of them are air cooled, some of them are water cooled, but every time he does one of those HP rigs, he does it differently, and it's always a big stretch from what he did previously. The other guy, G-gnome, has actually got two projects under his belt that were really, really, really well received by the community. His first one was called Orac3, which was based off of an old science fiction character, and it's an acrylic case with tons of chrome steel tubing, like shower hose on the inside of it, as well as chrome motherboard.

He put a whole lot of time and effort and investment into making Orac3. Then he just got finished doing another one that looks like a bomb, that is a spectacular work of art. Again, it's the whole patience, planning and execution. These two guys really exemplified it in my book. They've done spectacular work, and other modders especially -- and I'll raise my hand, myself included, just stand in awe at what some of these guys do. What was really flattering for me is, I follow Defiant and really appreciate the work he does, as well as how well he notates it online, and Defiant is actually a big fan of my BOSS rake, he actually has it as his wallpaper on his personal machine at home. So we've struck up a little bit of a relationship over the last couple of months. It's been very flattering to be accepted amongst guys that I actually learn a ton from, that I admire, but those two rigs stand out in my line.

Michael Johnson -- PodTech
Well Craig, it sounds like you've done some really amazing stuff with PCs and the projects really kind of show a lot of the work that you've put into it. Is there a website that we can point our listeners too, that they can see some of the projects.

Craig "Tech Daddy" Tate
I knew you would asked that, because during this whole -- I just went through surgery here a couple of weeks ago, and while I was laid up, I just said, what am I going to do when I'm not moving, and I built my own website, so http://www.tech-daddy.com, that's where I'm at, that's where I'm going to be posting up all my rigs, also my project logs, till I get my forms working on tech-daddy.com, http://www.tech-daddy.com. I also frequent two main websites, Austin Modders, which is a group of Central Texas guys like myself, Sheldog, Zapwizard Spider, the guy I told you about earlier. We're all members of Austin Modders, and that's just www.austinmodders.com, all one word. The other one is Modders-Inc, which is a up and coming commercial modding website. It's meant for large groups of people to get together and share ideas, share techniques, they have a really good base of how two articles, as well as explaining more advanced techniques, or how somebody did this particular type of mod project logs, galore out at Modders-Inc. http://www.modders-inc.com. Those are my two homes away from home, and the http://www.tech-daddy.com website is just going to do nothing but grow from here on. So step on by.

Michael Johnson - PodTech
That was Craig "Tech Daddy" Tate, one of the country's best known computer modders. This is the first of a two part Podcast with Tate, so join us next time for more of the conversion. You can check out his work at http://www.tech-daddy.com. This is Michael Johnson.