Scratch Build – In Progress Atlas - 18L ATX OC Machine

I increased the height by 40mm, the thickness of the card wasn’t the issue so an extruded panel wouldn’t help. The problem was I forgot to take the graphics card power connectors into account and they wouldn’t fit with the psu so close to them.

Edit:
I could try extruding just the PSU, not sure if it would look good though

 

With the motherboard away, I decided to plan out the airflow of the case. I can either have the CPU cooler fan and the GPU cooler fans act as intakes through a vented front panel with a few case fans as exhausts, or have a solid panel and more case fans for both intakes and exhausts. Any suggestions are welcome!

P.S. If I end up venting the front panel it's not gonna look like that

Edit:
before my MB broke down I tested my 980 ti Amp! Omega and it boosted past 1500mhz easily just by raising the power limit alone in afterburner without any voltage changes or bios mods. ASIC 69% too!

 

Just took the monster graphics card apart to prep for painting, thinking of going either a full stealth matte black or a matte black and white look. The middle part is plastic and the shroad is steel (I think) so I would need to buy two different types of paint.

Any color suggestions? (but I guess there isn't much of a choice between black and white...)

Edit: probably a bad picture, the first panel is grey and the second panel is a glossy "carbon fiber"

Edit:
Professional picture for more accurate colors

 

I used plastidip to make the innder plastic shell matte black and it already looks better than the original glossy carbon fiber pattern, when I settle on definite colors I will use something more permanent than plastidip


here is a mockup done with the help of /u/blghns from reddit! big thanks to his PS skills because I suck at it. Is the white and black too much? invert? all black? all white? silver?

 

Drew the panel that would be on top, housing 2x92mm exhaust fans and the PSU exhaust

While doing this I realized I couldn't fit the fans I wanted to buy which were 38mm thick, I would either need to extrude the top of the case (and might as well get 120mm fans) or get slimmer 25mm thick fans... you win some you lose some :/

Edit: going to try and compress future updates and make each update count more, I'm posting everyday mostly because I can't contain my excitement haha :/

Edit: Sanding down the metal shroud, might even keep the bare metal look, if not it's primed for painting anyway!

 

I continued to work on panel designs while my MB is in RMA, and I sketched out quite a few designs for the fan grills, though I haven't quite found the one, here are a few of them: (though I might just go back to basics with stripes haha)







I also mocked up the whole case sans some of the vents for the above reason

 

stripped the paint off and did some light sanding. The metal (steel? aluminum?) itself shows some discoloration so I will probably paint it. As a side note, don't use paint stripper aerosols when it's windy, I burned my own hand chemically that way and spent the rest of the day wondering if I burned myself anywhere else :/

 

It fits! Kind of.... replaced the CPU fan with a thicker 140XP from phanteks, similar temps but noticably quieter operation, yes it is secured by cable ties for now... The PCIE cable from li-heat also arrived but it was a tad too long and is currently causing the GPU to bulge a few mm out of the case bounds, already ordered a shorter one to fix that


penta-fans also arrived, not sure if I'm going to use them all though




industrial fans because more cool, more power. These are delta AFC0912 fans, 92mm x 25mm. Will be like jet engines when cranked up, but I probably won't set the fan curves that high anyway (they are PWM) In case you're wondering, these fans crank out a bit over 102CFM and 13mm H2O @ 100% PWM and 53dB-A, imagine 5 of them maxing out.... At almost 5000RPM yes they will mangle your fingers :/

White spray paint arrived today, so I will be painting the GPU shroud soon! This is really coming out to be a black and white build inside of a stealth black build, but I'm enjoying it!

 

after much toil, I'm finally done painting this thing. had to strip the paint down at one point because there was some spots were outrageously uneven and I got my fingerprints on the paint because I was too impatient.

The middle black part was sanded down instead of painted, went from 60 to 1000 grit then cleaned it up with a bit of magic eraser, there are still slight scratches but I didn't want to sand it down more as it was getting a bit reflective and I'm really going for a matte finish.


the fans and the IO are all fitted in with temporary brackets that will be replaced by panels. Unfortunately when broke my anti vandal switch when I was soldering... so going to have to get a new one. I also ordered the wrong length PCIE cable so as of now I'm still using the same 250mm cable that's too long (made sure I ordered the 200mm one this time).

As of now I'm pretty happy with the look, but unfortunately I don't have much time to work on the panels :/ but they will come!

 

This build might stay quiet for a while. I will probably be taking a course in 3D design next year which should help me better produce the designs for this rig. By then I might slap a pascal GPU in there too! But as of now everything works so I'm probably just going to leave them like so for now... update ETA 6 months!