News Kustom PCs offers a custom P180

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/11/30/kustomPC_offers_p180/



It's still the only ATX case I enjoy using...

 

nice ^^ wanted one of these back in the day

 

cool..... pun intended.

 

Not to diss what Kustom have done, I think that's very cool, and I love that shop. However, I really don't believe that the window doesn't decrease noise dampening, just the sheer fact that it's two bits of material on the side instead of one now must make a difference. I doubt most people would care though, most people stick noisy bits of kit in their PC's.

Does look extremely snazzy though.

 

150 quid! I'd never ever spend that much on a case.

 

If you spend long enough working inside bad cases, good cases suddenly seem worth the £100-200 they cost. A well designed, easy to use, easy to keep neat, and expandable case - is worth good money, especially if one likes the look of it.

 

The window looks crap tbh, they couldnt even fit it on the inside.

 

£150 for the P180 with a window mod? are they using bullet proof glass or something, the P180 with out the window mod can be bought for £80.

To be honest I think it spoils the look.

 

The legendary Coolermaster BlackWidow had a window on the outside so let's not hold that against KustomPCs. Now a £70 mark up can be held against them.

 

They provide a service, and a very good one at that. They also probably invalidate your warrenty so if the case breaks they'll have to pay to replace it. So it's them adding in a decent plexi window to the price, paying someone to make a good job of modding it in, picking up the cost of a 2 year warrenty, and trying to make a profit. Seems fair enough to me.

 

i like it alot but by the time its shipped to nz it would cost me both arms so i couldn't install the hardware lol

 

ya, they spoiled it. the beauty of the p180 is the cleanliness, and having a window ruins the perfection, no matter how good a job they do putting it in.

 

The trouble with it is that there's nowhere to hide cables from the PSU, with the window going down that far. I'd rather see the window just show the upper chamber, and maybe not the sides of the drive bays, either. That way, all the mess can be out of sight below the center divider, and the system can look neat and clean up top.

Then again, in my experience, "neat and clean" is relative in a P180.

 

Personally I think an almost 85% addition on the general retail price of the case alone is a little steep; but it's probably just me.

 

Hi Folks,

Thanks for your comments here - I've joined to address a few points raised...

'They couldn't fit it on the inside'

Correct - it's not possible to fit a window on the inside of the P180 case since the structure of the case is almost flush with the side panel. Besides, it wouldn't look so great, since the panel is thicker than most cases and would look a bit ugly to be exposde on the outside. We've been fitting windows on the 'inside' of cases for 6 years, so it would hardly be 'new' news.

Yes, what we've done does draw inspiration from the CoolerMaster cases, although using black rivets to complement the P180 scheme rather than screws.

There's a few concerns about price - yes, it is a lot more than the standard case (which we do continue to sell). The acrylic makes up the bulk of the price increase - it's not something we can buy 'off the shelf' and so the 5mm sheets of acrylic (thicker than the 2mm or 3mm used in most cases) have to be chamfered and polished especially for this modification, since just using a ragged sheet of acrylic would look absolutely awful. I appreciate I shouldn't hotlink images on this forum, but if you click the product link to our site in the article and see the close-up shot you'll appreciate that this acrylic looks far better than what's fitted on most stock cases.

Other than that, it's simply a question of volume - yes, CoolerMaster could produce a windowed case for maybe £20 more than their standard version, but they likely produced a couple of thousand of those at a time. Whereas, we might sell 10 of these over the course of a year. Resulting in higher acrylic price and of course that there's a lot of hand-work involved in actually producing this finished product.

We would love to sell hundreds of them and make it cheaper, but realistically it's unlikely to happen. But at least now anyone looking for a windowed P180 case has a choice that they didn't have before...

Felt it was only fair that I defended our corner a little and explained some of the 'how and why' on this.

Thanks,

Graeme

 

Thanks for the info, Graeme, and we hope you'll stick around the forums

 

Bit late now, might have thought about that before I bought my Lian Li V1000 PLUS...

 

I use a P180 for at least three rigs (media center, gaming, and CAD)

and for the gaming rig I felt it would be an interesting engineering project to see what could be done about fitting a window to it.

I threw out an exterior window as being too obtrusive and an interior one due to the fact that it wouldn't fit; so I decided to try a window flush with the exterior of the case.

the key to the project was the triple layer design of the panel. first I cut the window hole out neatly on a CNC machine I homebuilt out of old dot-matrix printers for a CAD/CAM project. once that was done I cut the plexiglas out slightly larger than the case window hole and had the CNC shave off some of the edge so the inner area was the same as the window.

then a couple of well placed drill holes in the corners with a beveled edge and some fan screws was all it took to finish.

I'm quite proud of it, my freind thought it was done by the original manufacturer!

only thing to think about now is some slots for the fan switches..