Case Mod - In Progress APERUM DESIGN - Project Starscream

INTRODUCTION
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This build has undergone ongoing planning between the client and I for the past 12 months with a deadline of early January 2018. The brief was to create a matt-black-and-gold build in the Cooler Master Mastercase Pro 6. Originally we had intended on incorporating some aspects of the geometry of the Transformers character, Starscream. However, we decided that this wasn't going to be so much a typical themed build which would try to emulate the subject. Instead, we simply wanted to add some interesting acrylic design that borrowed from the character's body, while keeping the very minimal modding mostly additive and minimalistic simply to clean up the case a little, since gold tends to look best against simple matt surfaces. The goals for this build were to place aesthetics at equal importance to performance. For this reason, the following design decisions were made:

• All components are to be as black and as simple in design as possible, excluding the fittings which will be gold.
• 16mm OD acrylic hardline tubing used to fill out the large internal size of the case with Mayhems pastel black coolant.
• Barrow Gold fittings to reduce cost compared to Bitspower True Brass.
• Custom laser-cut acrylic in matt-black to cover up and simplify most of the case.
• Custom laser-cut and line-bent geometric acrylic parts which resemble parts of Starscream's body.
• Natural white LEDs to allow the gold to shine through the tinted tempered glass panel, while keeping the matt-black internals mostly unlit.
• All ATX/EPS/PCIe cables custom-made from 4mm MDPC-X black sleeve over 16AWG wire, and all front-panel and SATA cable sleeved.
• Custom laser-cut acrylic cable combs (eg. 8+8 and 16+16 for GPU PCIe cables).
• Mountable CNC-milled cable combs to route all ATX/EPS/PCIe cables neatly.

PROGRESS INDEX
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UPDATE 01 (18/12/17) - Core Components Product Photography #1

 

Reserved

 

UPDATE 01 (18/12/17) - Core Components Product Photography #1

Typically my builds would start off with a few hundred hours in CAD, meaning I'd have some renders to show. In this build, all custom parts are laser-cut acrylic, so no 3D CAD will be necessary, although I did model up some of the acrylic work which will be shown at a later date. So instead, to start with, here are some of the core components we'll be throwing into the Mastercase Pro 6 from Cooler Master.



We originally wanted to go with the new Asus Maximus X Formula, however at the time of purchasing these components we were unsure of the release date, and the price was a little steep for the budget. The STRIX Z370-F is still an amazing board, and I'm so pleased with the direction manufacturers are taking motherboard design.

Couldn't quite fit a 960 Pro into the budget, but this will be plenty. I had wanted to minimise cable clutter by keeping all storage on M.2 drives, however it was just going to be too expensive. So instead, we ended up going for a single M.2 drive and an SSHD.

 

Had to go with the 8700K. A brilliant chip for gaming, and the extra cores will allow for some extra performance in multi-threaded tasks.

SLI EVGA GTX 1080 Cheesecake ACX 3.0 cards. SLI 1080ti's would've been ideal, however it was outside the budget. A single 1080ti would've been a more logical choice, however the dual cards work much better to fill out the case's internals. EVGA is always my go-to for watercooled builds.

My past 3 builds have all had Corsair Dominator Platinum RAM. The design is unbeatable if you ask me. These will have CableMod black memory kits on them eventually.

Always seem to end up using Corsair PSUs. This will be plenty for this build. We could've gone higher in terms of wattage, but at the time of purchasing I was unsure whether we would need the extra space in the case's lower compartment for storage. Sorry about the fingerprints



That's all for now. At the time of posting this, the build is about 50% complete. I should have a steady stream of updates for the next month or so before completion. Thanks for reading!

 

At some point you will need to start posting pictures of an actual build in progress please.

Thanks

George