Just been doing some planning: Will fit the current rig from project aurora in it. Does anyone have any suggestions/comments? Need to make sure it's perfect before I go ahead. The orange shell will be 5mm polycarb, the sides and mounts for things will be 3mm acryl. I have a set of corner brackets from an acrylic case that i will use to mount the side panels. All the mounts for HDD/slot load dvd drive/ etc will be mounted to the chassis with foam tape/MNPCTech 3m tape.
By the way that's 3 hours design work from scratch. The mobo and gpu are not the actual items being used, they were the closest in dimensions I could find to my actual hardware. Is polycarb any harder to bend than acrylic?
Looks awesome dude Your probably all ready going to be doing this but just in case I would suggest that you build a wooden jig for bending as getting 2 accurate 90º bends in the same piece could prove to be a nightmare :S
That was the plan. Need a big block of wood and a heat gun now. I will try and reduce the depth of the case design though, it looks a little out of proportion. I would like it to be shorter than 30. 5cm (12") as that's the size of the acrylic sheet I have from mnpctech. It would have worked with my old asus board but my ecs board is full width. The case is limited in width by the polycarb sheet I have. The mesh is there as filler.
Shrunk it! Moved the psu and changed the position of the optical drive and I now have a much smaller pc!180x295x308mm! The optical drive will be foam taped to the side panel, and I have removed the top 120mm fan to make way for the psu fan. The front just seems so...bland. Any ideas? I might remove the base (no longer needed) to make it even smaller! Reduces the height to 270mm Edit #3: Reduced depth to 280mm. So case is now 270h x 280d x 180w. Woo! 0.013M^3
I have sourced a set of blade server fans similar to: 40mm fans but can they move air or what? They'll suit the SFF setup of this case. Each fan is in fact 2 sets of blades, with different power sources for each. So in effect 8 fans to control! Time to design a PCB for a fan controller. Hmm :S
hmm... will need to control 8+ fans now Is there any way I can set up a circuit so that with a fan controller, only 1 of the two fans in the unit runs up to ~10v then when the fan controller goes above ~10v the second fan kicks in?
-The 'go smaller' will bite you in the *ss. Trust me. You want a lot more space behind the optical drive than that.
Yeah cheapskate, after a night of thinking a complete redesign is in order. It will still be small just not as small as the above design.
new ideas: (these involve the 4x 40mm fans, directed to the cpu heatsink via the case) All Black, no guards: Orange, no gaurds: Black, Guards: Orange, Guards: A few of you may recognize a hint of Cre8Serv in this one Opinions? EDIT: on a side note, I really need to model the actual board I have - planning a compartmentalized chassis and it's a bit hard designing the dividers when the mainboard model I have doesn't match up much with the ECS board. hmm
it would look really amazing if you made it like that, with orange guards, although i don't really know how you could make that in real. but, 40mm server fan, those are noisy as hell as far as i remember. if i were you i'd use two 80mm fans instead
I just like the look! They'll be run through a fan controller so only on full when needed. When 1/2 of each fan is running at 1/2 speed it's quite quiet still! The orange guards will be acrylic pieces I'm thinking
while i like the simple and clean look of the original... the second one has a very nice and aggressive feel to it... now the question i have to ask is... thems server fans are not the quietest fans out there... are you sure you want that jet engine running on your small build?
I'm happy to sacrifice noise for airflow (in the small space) and looks. I'm always wearing headphones when on the pc
well, it IS a good way of buffering out wife's nagging... good luck and please... pleeeeeaaaaassse, post lots of pics!
