Competent WC Case Design

[twin_savage]

I’ve designed a compact case for very high heat load water cooling (>1kW) while remaining quiet and I’d thought I’d share it here.
The case is mainly constructed of 14 gauge sheet metal with some 3d printed parts, a lathe for some of the hex extrusions would probably be beneficial but these could be 3d printed as well, with this in mind it should be fairly easy to produce yourself without specialized tools which was the pitfall I fell into with the last case design I posted here. Due to the amount of laser cutting time the panels require, sendcutsend doesn’t seem to be the most competitive place to order the panels from; I’m going to try fabworks, it’ll still be expensive when ordering single pieces instead of multiples, but its not far off from some of the higher end cases.

The model is 98% complete, there are a few things I didn’t bother modeling like screws, screw hole countersinks, foam intake filters and the power button (which is mostly 3d printed and sticks through one of the 140mm fan screw holes).

Feel free to critique anything you see on the case and I might change it before ordering (I’m probably going to order the sheet metal next week).

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Basic specs:

• 18"x8.25"x17" (LxWxH)
• 25lbs empty
• x3 thick 140mm intake fans
• x2 dual 180mm fans+radiators
• SFX PSU only
• SSI-EEB and ATX motherboard compatibility

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Interesting design points:

• The motherboard is elevated from the back by ~3/4" with fans behind it moving a lot of air so that the back side of the motherboard is cooled well.

• Since the radiators are crossflow, relatively little tubing is needed because the inlets and outlets are right next to the water blocks and pumps.

• Cable management is run from the bottom of the case to the top between the two radiators

Here’s the .STEP file for the case:
HPC Case.zip (10.4 MB)

[twin_savage]

…Sooo mistakes were made and today I’m going to try to fix them by opening up the radiator tube pass through holes into slots:

now slots:

The mistake stemmed from the drawing HWL provided for their radiators not matching up to reality. The circled dimension is probably closer to 20mm rather than 30mm on their actual product, but I just used their drawing blindly:

[twin_savage]

It’s almost complete:

The motherboard standoffs are a bit taller than they look in this picture, about triple the height of a normal motherboard standoff, they should provide enough height so that the 4 180mm fans can push all that air through the radiators.

The “back” side of the case is pretty much all radiator exhaust

One area that I thought turned out better than expected is the how well two panels matched up against each other (notice how all the screws that hold the PSU on are hidden by the second panel):

[twin_savage]

Okay final checkin on the project, the build is complete: