Having always liked the Dell XPS 700 series of case, i finally decided to get one and attempt to mod it so that a standard ATX board would fit. Translation - i was drunk, on ebay and thought "phuck it, lets give it a whirl"
Oh i should warn 56k users (are there any still out there?) that the pictures here arent exactly small!!!
Admire the case if you will .... before i get to butcher it .....
Its a damn heavy case, with the surrounding metal being 4mm thick. Its not magnetic either denoting really good quality steel. The finish is awesome and the case has an awesome quick release catch at the back and the door comes off very easily, but is rock solid when fitted.
Before you ask, the wires dangling down from the hard drive cages is from a 8cm fan placed between them.
The backing is completely the opposite to ATX, guaranteeing plenty of cutting. I'm wanting to keep the black plastic as much as possible to keep the look of the case.
The LED's at the front.
Stealth covers are actually part of one big door (release mechanism visible on 2nd picture). Each optical bay cover can be individually removed . Nice one!
A closer look at the drive cage, and the back plastic piece removed.
The front USB / Firewire & Audio connectors. Middle torch like thingies are dell's LAN activity and diagnostic lights.
As you can see its a proprietry part which the front LED's connect to. The plastic piece is the switch which affixes to the metal housing.
These LED's were at the back of the case, illuminating the IO panel. I intend to use them at the front, most likely for HDD activity lights.
The motherboard tray I have aquired for the job is from an Akasa Eclipse 62. They were willing to sell me one for £30 delivered. Sweet! Its a medium grade stainless steel piece (a magnet does stick to it) but it has an excellent finish. I wanted aluminium for cutting purposes but much preferred the look of this one.
First job is to cut the back out and see how the new motherboard tray is going to fit. But first, i need fuel!!
Ahhhhh the kebab, corner stone of any nutritional diet ...... to be washed down with liver destroying swedish "feel good" drink.
Bloated and feeling very important to the world for some reason, i started to attack the case. Marking and cutting out the back so that the motherboard tray would slide in was not as easy as i first thought. It involved many attempts at sliding it in only to discover a little bit more needed cutting here and there. The steel was particularly tough, its about 3mm thick and is by no means mild steel.
To top it off the dremel or JCB rotary tool gets very hot after 20 minutes of use. After much pulling on and off the bench i finally get the board seated.
I've lined the sides of the tray with electrical tape to avoid scratching on the rough metal. Since there will be much cutting i didnt see the point of smoothing it off each time only to cut it later. I dont want to waste too much time.
Another reason i chose the akasa is because it is wider than the xps case. Some of the Lian Li motherboard trays i found were not as wide and would only leave a gap to fill. Since this overlaps so much, it should hide any poor workmanship. Meaning much neater finishing lines. At least thats what i'm hoping.
Here you can see what i mean by the need to repeatadly measure and cut .... fitting it as best as possible, mark where / what needs to be cut and chop it off like a jewish newborn. It did start to get quite frustration.
You may dub it being overly cautious but i'd rather cut too little off at a time and take longer to complete than cut too much off and ruin it.
After much more cutting and smoothing of the xps case, its starting to come together. The fan was a bit high up so i had to drop the whole motherboard tray 4mm because of the plastic backing. But thanks to the thick and folded metal, weakening it is not an issue. Even with the extra cut off its still very strong.
As hoped, the Akasa mobo tray is covering up things nicely. A bit more cutting and milling to finalise the lines on the case and tray and i should be getting there. I even drilled some holes at the sides of the xps case so that the rivets on the mobo tray will pass through, seeing a flush fitting.
Need to mill down the rough and burs from the mobo tray. Also the fan grill has got to go! It is visually smaller than the 120mm fan and is going to choke airflow. Besides, the honey comb grill pertrudes outward and i will be mounting the fan externally. Reason being is that when i did this on my current case, my mobo temps dropped 1-2 degrees. Probably because of the location of rear heatsink on the P5B-Deluxe - air can be dragged up and out rather than up around and out. It never did anything to CPU temps, but i would like to keep that scenario for this case. I'll mount it internally as well just to compare.
Grill cut and top lines smoothed. Notice that the fan hole looks much bigger!
I also had to relocate the drilled holes .... remember i said i dropped the mobo 4mm? Well i didnt! At this stage, when fitting the mobo tray the back plastic piece was also re-fitted to see how things were lining up. Good thing is they cover up those drill holes. Yay.
Time to concentrate on the back plastic for a bit to assure proper allignment.
I dont really want to cut away all the plastic, i intend to re-use the off cuts and re-arrange / rebuilt the back to the new motherboard tray layout. You can see where i am going in the next picture
Its going to require some careful sanding and gluing .... i asked a friend to get me some quick drying epoxy resin since he was on the way up. Superglue turns plastic white with blisters!
However the idiot brought me 1 hour curing stuff. Do you know how long that takes to dry? YES, AN HOUR!!! Im not going to sit there holding two piece of plastic together for an hour, look how many of them there are! In his defence he does have an IQ that would rival a tomato plant in winter - "he thought it would go hard in a few minutes and be solid in an hour", where as its 24 hours.
Anyway, thats it for now. I've typed way to much and i'm coming down, or sobering up .... feel free to point out spelling or grammer errors, im sure it will keep me up at night. Otherwise comment away.
*edit* - ok after a quick read i saw loads of errors and did edit them, probably missed some but at least i'll sleep better !!!!!
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. Anyway nice modding, I always thought the XPS range we're ugly to be honest. Prove me wrong 
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