Case Mod - In Progress THE FIRST ORDER - FINISHED PHOTOS DARK - (Supermicro CeBIT 2016)

Hey everyone, I have been lucky enough to work with Supermicro before for the Opteron Prime casemod ( http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=261829 ). Now Supermicro is working hard to get into the gaming market. They have released their 3rd line of Z-series motherboards and now also a chassis. They are taking this to the events around the world and what better way than to bring a casemod right?

That's what I thought.

I am happy to be able to work with Supermicro again on this project. They asked me to make a project for them to take along them from event to event. The first one being: CeBIT 2016 Hannover Germany. The theme of the build is the dark force of Star Wars and the name is The First Order.

I am using their C7Z170-CQ motherboard and S5 Gaming chassis.

Thank you very much for your faith in my work Supermicro!

For those that are wondering: Supero is the Supermicro gaming brand.



Lets have the photos do the talking.



First up the Chassis:















I was happy to have Bitspower on my side to aid with the watercooling parts.

For the first time I went with pre-coloured hardware. So red CPU block, red pipes and red reservoir. I paired it with the carbon black fittings for a nice contrast and a black pumptop for the D5 pump and a red cover kit for the D5 pump.























Thank you very much Bitspower for the faith in another project!



Next up is the motherboard and putting some lovely hardware onto it.
We bought some very nice KLEVV 3000Mhz 4*4GB DDR4 memory that suits the build really well.

And we chose to go with the newest i7: the 6700K.





















By now I drilled a few extra holes in the top so I could fit a 360mm Bitspower radiator (m4 threads on it nice). A very nice compact one.
I also tossed out all the HDD cages as I need the room for custom parts and watercooling goodness.







See you at the next update.

 

I went to work with my buddy Django Soeterboek on drawing various covers for the fans, the PSU cover and one to also cover the IO silver blocks on the motherboard.





Up untill now I have always used a heatgun to bend all my plexiglass parts. But some bends were not always perfect and doing bends very close to eachother were near impossible. So I made my ghetto plastic bender from:

- piece of wood I had left;
- an aluminium U profile I had laying around;
- 2 screws for the wire;
- resistence wire;
- a 12v 6A LED strip power supply;
- 2 crocodile clips;
- 1 pull spring.

And that is it
It bends 3mm acrylic perfectly. 4mm is possible, but take a long wait and you have the risk of the surface burning / getting bubbles.

It works fine when

 

Case looks interesting Tim,seems a solid bit of kit.

 

Awesome Tim! Bring it!

 

Ooo yeah nice one. I forgot that Super Micro were making motherboards for the enthusiast market.

Apparently they're not so hot, relying on DIP switches which is bizarre.

Not sure if I like the case yet, but I'm sure as ever you will win me round

 

The case is not bad actually. It does have a small few improvement points.
But mostly the front design doesn't seem to land well with gamers and system builders.
The case is being redesigned at the moment.

But I think I will make it a tad more appealing hopefully ^^

Thanks Y0gi

This C7Z170-CQ is not their high-tier Z170 motherboard. They have recently released the C7Z170-OCE and in all honesty I think that one looks the business. They did very well on that one. The one I am using here for example does not support SLI, but it does Crossfire. But it is a very good piece of kit. Supermicro is not great at marketing these motherboards. They have a big amount of copper layers, all kinds of server grade components. You should read the review about it on TweakTown by Sin. He takes the motherboards component by component and he knows his stuff

They don't use many DIP-switches which seems to be a comment by a lot of users. On these motherboards you can litterally turn everything on and off by coupling or decoupling pins. For extreme overclockers this seems to be pro. I think it is about eliminating any unneeded signal interference from other components than the ones needed to overclock.

But each to his own

I hope you like the end result of this project buddy

 

I worked on the plexiglass pieces a bit more.
I found some red plexiglass that was a good shade of red to match the other stuff but also not be transparent but does let through light. Ideal for backlighting for the logos and other stuff.

Here is the PSU cover and the front inside fan grill.

I am using 4 Thermaltake RED riing fans (3 in the top for the radiator and 1 in the rear for the outlet fan). So just a black grill will work fine with it. But the 2 front fans are actually Antec 140mm quiet fans completely black. So a bit down the line I added a red layer of plexiglass to the front grill in the exact same size and shape to get the red and black contrast going on. I will show pictures of that later on.

 

I wanted to also make the other side of the case a bit interesting. So I went to Google for some nice engraving GFX. And I came across this one. I justhad to use it. I don't know who created it, but not me. So I cannot take any credit for these gfx.

I got it engraved in the sidepanel. What do you guy think?

 

Best. Sidepanel. Ever.

 

Thanks man

 

I received a lot of parts from Bitspower, but at the last minute I changed the loop as the one I initially thought up was not good enough in my eyes. I was lacking room for it. So I had a bit of a dilemma how to use the fittings I had to make the new idea work. So I ended up with this construction
Basically if I drain the system only the pump has a tiny bit of liquid in it left. All other parts are higher. So that is not bad And I didn't have to buy additional fittings.

 

Looks great Tim, making a decent build as always.

 

That side panel is epic, looking forward to seeing the rest of it .

 

Thanks baby

Thank you sir.

 

Like always I sleeved my own cables

I made a rainbow extension for the 24 pin because of the double wires in the regular 24 pin cable. But sleeved the 8 pin EPS and a 6+6+2 cable I shortened and sleeved. The coloures are MDPC Color X, black and a hint of carbon sleeving.





Here is the GPU cable installed to see if the length is correct to the GTX 980TI ref.

 

I wanted to do something funny with the SSD. It was self bought so we could do anything we wanted with it. It was originally a HyperX Fury SSD. I kinda wanted to give it a Star Wars theme with a wink. Like it could be in a Star Wars ship. But also like HyperX could bring it out in 10 years

So I ended up making a HyperX Fury HYPERDRIVE of 240 Petabyte

I mounted it in the front dual 5,25 inch bay as I had no use for it.
There is a full red plexiglass enclosure around it so you cannot see any cables or the inside of the case.

 

hehe nice I like it !

 

Thank you

 

I started work on putting the system together. Like always I need to do it in a specific order to be able to reach everything I need. I will never learn xD

 

The final part I wanted to make from plexiglass was a shroud for over the GPU.

I wasn't allowed to mod the GPU itself because they wanted it to be easy swappable with another GPU. I still wanted to do something about the appearance.

So I made this cover with a small wink to Nvidia and Star Wars.

I hope you like it.