So that is the legacy of the Main Build. I did find some pictures of my “first build as an Adult.” I say this because my father used to work for big tech companies like Burroughs/Unisys, Lucent, Oracle, and a few others when I lived in the home. I used to get told “you dont need any more than that” when it came to wanting parts to upgrade the home PC.
This may have fueled my desire to build overbuilt extreme systems (OK, not that extreme, but more so than the average consumer). Maybe I have a complex lol.
Since I love cooling I should probably mention the last few cases you saw in the above post and my impressions. Both were “Cube” style cases so a little more squat but fatter. The concept of having two chambers is a great one for keeping components cool in my opinion and it opens up nice real-estate for either larger amounts on onboard storage or room for liquid cooling support such as pump mounting and drain and fill locations for a nice clean look if you dont like to see your reservoir. So lets get to it.
The Corsair 680x (Very similar to the 540 air in capability, but with glass panels instead of mesh).
The radiator capabilities of some of these cases can be misleading at first if you don’t read the fine print or do some research of other builds in the case. In the case of the 680x it can handle “up to” (this is what gets you) a 360mm radiator up front (can be thick if it’s the ONLY radiator or you use a 120mm rad top or bottom) and up to a 280mm radiator in the top and bottom of the case. Now these all wont fit at the same time. I had it set up with a 240mm radiator in the top, and a 360mm radiator in the front that set up was fine, but I would get a slight heat soak from warm air being put into the case.
I also had the flow a little wonky so it went through the front cool air in rad, then through the top rad that was actually probably not as effective. I moved the 240mm rad to the bottom to be a intake so all the radiators were intaking cool air. I actually got a few C warmer at longer play times due to heat soak, but I mean 2 to 5 maybe.
I still wasn’t happy so I moved to a dual 280mm Rad set up which was actually a little more surface area than the 360mm and 240mm (heres the #'s- 360mm and 240mm was 72,000mm2, the dual 280mm was 78,400 only a 8-9% increase in surface area). I also changed the air flow a little against the norm for this one. I had the front as a intake, but I had both the top and bottom rads as exhaust. Usually you want to follow natural convection but fans can easily overcome it with very little effort. Due to only having the front as intake I had to adjust fan curves to keep positive pressure in the case, so the front fans would run almost twice the speed of the radiator fans.
I could go on for hours but I’ll break it up into pieces as I go. BACK to the case itself.
What I liked-
-Tons of storage, Cooling options, room to build, case build quality was impressive and firm, easy mostly tool less assembly and looks clean. The easily removeable radiator or fan mounts that come out of the unit for the top and from mounts with just thumb screws are nice for easy cleaning. The lower part of the case does not have this option but a nice built in filter. The other front and top materials are only plastic filters with holes. I’m kind of a snob though and prefer nylon mesh for everything.
Not so good- I’m being nitpicky here but the glass the way its mounted and the amount of it doesn’t allow for the BEST airflow like a all mesh intake would. Also, the top panel causes some heat to be recycled into the case because the channel lines right up with the front intake panel. It’s the short side, but there was a few degrees C difference between the upper portion of the intake and the lower end measured from inside the case. It can get a bit cramped as you can see from the images in the first post and here as well.
I had a lot of fun tuning this case and building it the way I liked. I finally put together a build to sell with it here- I sold it with the 280mm radiators because they aren’t was universally adaptable to a case. Most are geared towards 120mm width rads in the ATX formfactor range.
Im actually really regretting selling the 1080 Ti. This was before prices got crazy for used GPU’s.
Well thats all for today. I’ll have another post tomorrow. I think I’ll be moving on to my shift towards building a itx or SFF pc. This is where I got the itch to MAKE IT SMALLER…and liquid cool it!!! lol
