PC Cases

[Bob Williams]

Front panel does attract dust thanks to the 2x intake fans, but it stays on the outer surface. Panel is easy to remove though.

When the Thought Police arrive at your door, think -
I'm out.

[The Duke]

Re cable management. Unless you’re doing it to look nice, something I’ve never got, but I hate LEDs so I don’t want a fancy looking PC. But if you’re doing it for added airflow for cooling, it’s a waste of time.

Linus tech tips done a great set of tests about 5 years ago (cant look it up, as I’m on foreign data and I’m not wasitn it sorry) .

They went from a tidy case, under load, then in incremental steps made it less tidy, then went mad, stuffing a T shirt, an iron and all kinds of crap in this mess of a pc, and the temps hardly moved.

My pc cases are all over 10 years old, and top mounted, both half decent cases. I just bung the rats nest where the dvd drive would of been and call it a day. Maybe the odd zip tie to hold it up there. But that’s about it.

I do appreciate a tidy  water cooled, led, tempered glass system. I just don’t want one. It would drive me mental.

 

[Tippon]

The Duke wrote:

Linus tech tips done a great set of tests about 5 years ago (cant look it up, as I’m on foreign data and I’m not wasitn it sorry) . They went from a tidy case, under load, then in incremental steps made it less tidy, then went mad, stuffing a T shirt, an iron and all kinds of crap in this mess of a pc, and the temps hardly moved.

I think I’ve found it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDCMMf-_ASE

I haven’t got time to watch it now though, so have saved it for later.

[The Duke]

Lol, that’s shows my terrible grasp of time. But that’s the one.

[D-Dan]

I have watched it before, but it was a nice re-visit 🙂

Arch Linux, on a Ryzen 7 1800X, 32 GB, 5 (yes -5) HDs inc 5 SSDs, 4 RPi 3Bs + 1 RPi 4B - one as an NFS server with two more drives, PiHole (shut yours), Plex server, cloud server, and other random Pi stuff. Nice CoolerMaster case, 2 x NV GTX 1070 8GB, and a whopping 32" AOC 1440P monitor.

[Bob Williams]

Just another performing, exhibitionist American YT-er. Too much meaningless verbal, too few facts.

Steve, I am halfway between tidy and obsessive: my case is a Coolermaster N300, the one Dan chose in his Page 1 link. It’s bottom mounted and will take a watercooled fitment, or fans everywhere – 2x front inlet, 1 on the case floor, 1 at the side, 2 at case top and 1 at rear. I just have 2 front inlet, 1 top exhaust and 1 rear exhaust. It all works fine and all my temp’s are below 30ºC. The cable management is great, most cables are tucked in behind the backplates, although I can get the rest up above the DVDRW. Lots of empty space for air to move across components and the exhaust fans work with the CPU cooler: an Arctic Freezer Pro. What that sucks out, is sent further on its way by the top and rear fans.

When the Thought Police arrive at your door, think -
I'm out.

[D-Dan]

I finally got around to taking the side panels off for a look, and it does seem very well organised. My only problem is taking the front panel off, which I haven’t managed yet. It seems firmly stuck on. I suppose I could add the optical from behind, so not the end of the world.

Also ordered (and delivered to work today, but I took the day off so haven’t seen it yet) A single bay, dual SSD caddy. So yay, no having an SSD sat in there on a shelf anymore.

Arch Linux, on a Ryzen 7 1800X, 32 GB, 5 (yes -5) HDs inc 5 SSDs, 4 RPi 3Bs + 1 RPi 4B - one as an NFS server with two more drives, PiHole (shut yours), Plex server, cloud server, and other random Pi stuff. Nice CoolerMaster case, 2 x NV GTX 1070 8GB, and a whopping 32" AOC 1440P monitor.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

The whole front comes off and you can unclip the drive bay cover mesh from behind. This also makes cleaning off the dust easy.

[Bob Williams]

Wheels-Of-Fire wrote:

The whole front comes off and you can unclip the drive bay cover mesh from behind. This also makes cleaning off the dust easy.

Graham is right, Dan. Feel for the slot at the bottom of the front panel and don’t be afraid of giving it a sharp tug with your fingers. The top will follow, with another sharp tug. As the switch panel is at the side and separate to the panel. you cannot damage anything there. Slide the DVDRW in from the front and line up the front panel with it, to make sure it’s aligned flush. Screw and connect everything up and replace front panel.

When the Thought Police arrive at your door, think -
I'm out.

[Ed P]

IIRC either your case should have some take-apart instructions, or you can find them on-line. It is a while since I had mine, the worst aspect was trying to fit a water-cooled CPU routing the pipework to a top mounted fan array was a total pain.I came to the conclusion that water-cooling was over-rated at worst, frustrating as hell at best!

[D-Dan]

Progress. I took the day off work yesterday, and went back in today. After my woes converting the boot drive to work on a UEFI system (even in BIOS mode), I wasn’t expecting any more until weekend.

As it happens, the MB bundle arrived at work yesterday, so home it came. I’d planned on just mounting the MB to the chassis and connecting up the chassis wiring, but of course with that done, I couldn’t resist checking it would at least get to the BIOS screen. I figured how hard could temporarily moving the PSU be.

I found out when I knocked the fan of the cooler in old rig, and couldn’t be bothered faffing about with the weird restraining clips, so it looks like the rebuild was advanced a few days.

I have to say, it took 3 hours, but that’s because I tested after each drive and PCI card was transplanted. First boot was nice, final boot with all drives (there are 7, not 6, including the optical. I forgot I had a PCI SATA port in there).

Benchmarks are out of this world. CPU upgrade has more than doubled frame rates in the latest three unigine benchmarks (heaven, valley and superposition, with heaven and valley hitting a solid minimum 60 fps on ultra settings, and a comparison with what I could have got if I’d upgraded, I hit 24th spot for superposition, even beating 1080s).

Render tests in Blender are also surprising. My go-to test scene (all home made) is pretty heavy on the render, and last night just for kicks I added volumetrics. In tests with and with out the volumetrics, with the only changes being between GPU and CPU rendering, and tile size (to get the best performance in each), CPU is now beating GPU, by a fair old margin.

These were fairly low sample tests, and more testing is needed, but initial tests tell me this is now a kick ass system.

And to think, I was still quite happy with the Phenom II X4 965 system. This literally blows it away.

Reused from the Phenom build literally everything except CPU, MB, RAM, Cooler and chassis, hence kept the cost below £900.

Feeling quite happy right now.

Oh, and the build was quite uneventful.

Arch Linux, on a Ryzen 7 1800X, 32 GB, 5 (yes -5) HDs inc 5 SSDs, 4 RPi 3Bs + 1 RPi 4B - one as an NFS server with two more drives, PiHole (shut yours), Plex server, cloud server, and other random Pi stuff. Nice CoolerMaster case, 2 x NV GTX 1070 8GB, and a whopping 32" AOC 1440P monitor.

[The Duke]

Always nice to have a new kick ass toy.

[Dave Rice]

“And to think, I was still quite happy with the Phenom II X4 965 system. This literally blows it away.”

I did say modern hardware is in a different league ? and seeing is believing!

I can’t remember what mobo you got now, but if it has an NVMe M2 slot, make your next drive one of those. I couldn’t believe what a difference it made to the recent mega build PC.

The owner had a similar revelation when he opened the biggest most complex dwg file he has and just smoothly zoomed in and out of it. In that case it was the 4GB 1050 Ti doing all the work, the CPU is waiting to do the grunt work of editing.

[Ed P]

I had a very different mobo at the time I owned a similar case. The only issue I discovered was that the ram temps were high after a 24 hour  stress test and needed an auxiliary fan. Could just have been the mobo layout and all the water cooling pipework at fault but something perhaps to check.

[D-Dan]

I’m on air cooling only at the moment, with just the stock single front/single rear fans, and even under stress the temp isn’t bad (< 50). GPU is lower than CPU, but only 1 or 2 degrees. A Freezer 13 cooler on it. Having said that, I’m used to a mess of cables all over the case, rather than almost cable free with the management this case provides. There’s definitely a lot more air around everything, and even with the vents with no fans, it’s going to help cooling.

Fortunately, I have temps displayed on my conky desktop, and so if anything starts going awry, I’ll spot it quickly, and possibly invest in a double front fan and maybe a top double exhaust.

At the moment, I’m still enjoying the performance 🙂

Arch Linux, on a Ryzen 7 1800X, 32 GB, 5 (yes -5) HDs inc 5 SSDs, 4 RPi 3Bs + 1 RPi 4B - one as an NFS server with two more drives, PiHole (shut yours), Plex server, cloud server, and other random Pi stuff. Nice CoolerMaster case, 2 x NV GTX 1070 8GB, and a whopping 32" AOC 1440P monitor.

[Bob Williams]

So far, so good, so happy Dan! ?May it continue to please.?

When the Thought Police arrive at your door, think -
I'm out.

[Author]

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