MWAVE MODWARS 2016 Powered By Thermaltake, ASUS, Kingston & Intel For those that don't know, MWAVE as well as the above partners are holding a competition between 5 Ausyralian modders that were hand picked to compete for bragging rights! Knock my socks off and call me lucky, i'm one of those 5! So with that here's an introduction to some hardware: CASE: Thermaltake P3 PSU: Thermaltake Toughpower GOLD 750W RGB Power Supply COOLING: Heaps of Thermaltake Watercooling Parts! MB: ASUS ROG Maximus VIII Hero Alpha Z170 LGA 1151 Motherboard GPU: ASUS GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition 8GB Video Card CPU: Intel i7 6700K CPU RAM: Kingston HyperX Fury 16GB (4x4GB) 2400MHz DDR4 Black SSD: 2 x Kingston HyperX Savage 120GB 2.5" SATA SSD OMG, I've always pieced my builds together having everything is kinda intimiating haha. P3, a small P5/ Cable management is actually awesomely laid out. Should be interesting to work with this style of case. 750W of Golden goodness Pacific W3 CPU waterblock Pacific transparent waterblock for FE 1070/1080. (waiting delivery of GTX 1070) 2x 360's on a P3? Interesting All the fans for those rads Really dig the Thermaltake dress-up kits for their D5 pumps Bendy tools. Asus ROG Maximus VIII Hero Alpha Might as well go top shelf? I do like 4x4 Sick, raid-0 SSD's for the haters For this build I plan on doing something inspired by the "No Mans Sky" concept art that I've been looking at. A huge fan of that pastel colours so feeding off that for inspiration. I keep coming back to this image. Already started modelling, really trying to learn new techniques and try new things with every build. Super excited to see this take shape! Updates to come! A HUGE thanks to MWAVE, Thermaltake, ASUS, Kingston and Intel for inviting me to be part of this competition.
So a first update! Learning from other projects I've decided to template a few key things out to make sure they will all lay out like I had planned. The motherboard has been inverted, and relocated from top left to centre bottom of the Thermaltake P3 Going for a spacecraft theme I made up some radiator shrouds that will make up the wings and some thrusters and then starting to work from there. I like the look of the FE card laid flat across the PCI slots of the board. Now I have to work on making the panels for real and also filling in the gaps. From there we start to add in the detail parts and a lot, I mean a lot of wiring... Thanks for stopping by! and again, A HUGE thanks to MWAVE, Thermaltake, ASUS, Kingston and Intel for inviting me to be part of this competition.
So all the build logs have been done, so where have I been? Well, I've had an awesome run of luck in short I lost all images relating to this build because I had the OS on my SLR crash (weird right?) and the whole SD card went to poop. I tried all kinds of recommendations from peeps and I managed to get the 'files' off but all images were only partial and none usable. I guess Ill just have to upgrade to a GH4 or something... Anyway, these are the images I had on my phone, they are dirty and an embarrassment but they show the progress of the log. Ill try narrate where appropriate. Because of my choice of PSU the 24pin and EPS aren't actually modular so a solution needed to be though up to make that as neat as possible. Solution was to notch and recess the PSU into the case. It actually worked mickey mouse! Coming up flush with the underneath of the case. Actually really happy with how this worked out. Its held in with a aluminum strap I made that was bent around the PSU.
So after I got the PSU notched in I laid the motherboard out and started to think where everything would go with the 'spaceship' always in mind. If you're familiar with the Thermaltake P3 the motherboard is in a 'standard' orientation and sits top left. I switched it so the motherboard was inverted (CPU and bottom, PCI lanes up top) and mounted it bottom edge but centered. Again with the spaceship view in mind I decided to keep the GPU on air. I liked the look of the founders addition blower cooler so I spun it and mounted it length ways across the PCI lanes. It turned out that as I mocked it there's 3 screw holes in the back of the stock cooler that don't actually have a use by default, but they lined up spot on for me. Lining up where it would be it also lined up straight ontop of the holes for the CPU waterblock. So the question of how to mount the GPU came super easy, it fell into place! All that was needed was a single piece of aluminium angle . Getting down and looking across it the GPU almost looks like its floating. Clearances are tight but it just sneaks in above the PCIE extender, if you hadn't figure out that's how I was connecting the GPU into the PCIE slot was via a ribbon extender. Next I just needed to mount up the radiators, plumb them and do some detail work Hope you're enjoying this different take on the P3
Unfortunately I didn't get some steps with the phone but essentially I just used some aluminium strip and bent it up for the radiator mounts. After the radiators were mounted I got some acrylic to make the top of the wings. No CNCs or laser cutters here, just a jigsaw. Just went super slow and end result wasnt half bad! After it was just I just ran over the edges with a file then sandpaper. My original design had some of the wings boxed in but I decided against it. I wasn't confident that I could line them both up identical and it would have looked incredibly obvious if they were symmetrical.
Again, apologies for the lack of and subsequent sub par quality photos. Here we are finished! I was super lucky with the power cable runs. They are crazy tight but ended up just fitting. I really wish I had hardlined this, but the lack of bulkheads and no F-F meant it wasnt possible. And off the build went to the other side of the country for EB Games Expo in Sydney. Again, a HUGE thanks to MWAVE, Thermaltake, ASUS, Kingston and Intel for inviting me to be part of this competition. I hope everyone has enjoyed this build and i'm already working on the next one. Hopefully at a pace and planning that I have a little more control of
