Since I'm stuck down here in Austria with a toaster of a laptop I've been messing about in SketchUp for the last weeks time. I got the idea of creating an ITX case with full watercooling support and full size GFX support, but at the same time keeping the size as small as possible. As of right now the case measures (WxHxD) 265x240x300 in mm, and I believe it's probably the smallest I can go. Featues: Reversed motherboard - look at your sexy GFX waterblock all day through the window right above the card 3 x 120 mm fans, supports a 2x120 rad of up to 50 mm thickness and a 1x120 rad in up to 30 mm thickness Downsides: It's designed for 1U PSUs. It's meant to save space. eVGA already ships one with their Hadron case, and Parvums newly made ITX case also features a smaller PSU than normal. There's only room for 2.5" discs. Personally I only use SSDs and a single 500 gb 2.5" normal disc for storage, so it simply isn't in my needs There's not really enough airflow in the hardware compartment to sustain an air-cooled PC, that might be fixed by swapping the topside window for a mesh grid of some kind? Anyways.. Here's a few pictures. Please provide me with as many questions as you want/can, since I'm seriously considering going through with the project.
Nice looking design! At about 17 litres, your design is about the same volume as the Parvum Systems X1 that has just been reviewed here in B-T. There are smaller working water cooled designs out there, have a look at these 3 on Hardforum: A madly small air cooled A4 7 litre ITX design is being worked on now for crowdfunding. The now famous NCase M1 water cooled ITX design at about 12 litres, which is being batch made by Lian Li. Interestingly, the Nova at about 17 litres is able to take a larger mATX motherboard and 2 graphics cards... So, it should be possible to achieve what you are wanting to do in that size. I know very little about water cooling, but your case will need to have some well planned airflow to get cool air in and across the radiators.
Also a Cooltek Coolcube maxi will be in the same League (although accepting standard PSUs and mATX MBs). some tricks (like inserting te radiator at an angle) could make it a good water cooled unit.
Alright the design is finalised and I'm in the stage of the last bits of planning/looking for materials. One question. What thickness should I use for the aluminium? I'm thinking 1 mm to 1,5 mm, but unsure if it'll suffice
I am shopping for aluminium plate for side panels at the moment and would say that 1.5mm is a good balance between weight and strength.
Alright! Time to move on with this project. I've spent some extra time with the design, and I've made up some changes. The size has increased a bit to accomedate an SFX PSU instead of the 1U's, which should help expand the PSU support and lower the noise, and to add a bit more space for graphic cards, which SHOULD allow for cards with bigger PCBs, think Asus DC2U. Still designed with full watercooling in mind, and with space enough for 3 x 120 rad with a thickness of up to 40 mm, it should be enough to cool almost anything I can throw at it in the future. Overall the size has ended with 300 x 300 x 233, which is still smaller than i.e the Corsair 250D, so I'm quite happy with that. Plan is to make a custom reservoir in the front. As always feel free to post some feedback. Will probably order material and the remaining tools I need next week, and start building on it.
