Case Design for Liquid Cooling

[Mick64]

I, personally, use 6 5.25" bays in my TJ07: 2 rheobuses, 1 optical drive and 3 3.5" HDDs suspended in this. As it was mentioned before, 5.25" bays are very good for decoupling of HDDs using suspension. And I'd gladly use another two bays for reservoirs for my 2 loops.

You have stated that you use 6 5.25" bays, when you actually only need to use 3. The hard drives could be mounted in a HDD rack. If you were building a system in my case, you could even use the top two bays for reservoirs....

yes. but all 5.25 drive bys would provide flexibility of moving drives around. if someone wishes to remove three of them? even get the antec 900 effect of 2 fans in the front

Blanking plates would be provided for unused bays. I'm sure I've probably said this before, although it may have been lost when the server went down? but this case is designed for water cooling. Most of the hot components would be cooled with water not air, therefore I don't see the need for more fans, especially smaller ones, as this will just generate more noise.

the only thing i dont like is the psu fan hole... itll pull hot air from the graphics cards... wouldnt it make sense to pull cool air from under the case by flipping it?

Again, the air in the middle section should not be that hot, at least not hot enough to effect the performance of the PSU. As most PSU's now use a large fan for cooling I felt that the most effective use of this fan would be to accelerate the air flow through the case, improving the cooling effect, instead of waisting the airflow through the PSU alone....

your design is greagt but mick64 is right, 3.5" only bays are outdated 5.25" are much more flexible

additionally i don't know ANY high quality 200mm fan out there, it'll be quite difficult to source a fan of this size -> 2 120mm are a better choice

maybe it's possible to make a 3.5" and 5.25" bay with a blanking plate for the 200 mm fan once youn install the 5.25" bays

it would be a great feature and VERY flexible

I think I've answered some of these questions above, as for the fan, there are several 200mm fans available here and probably more on the way. What you have to remember is that the larger the fan, the slower it needs to rotate and then less noise is produced...

I also like everything about the case except the front fan grill. Maybe a plate over the grill would clean up the look for the front.

I really can't see the problem with the front fan grill? It matches the side grills, which I think pulls the whole look of the case together...

Mick,

You have great case design here. Realize that there is no way you'll satisfy everyone's desire though. That's the nice thing about modding cases. If you don't like it then mod it.

I think you are on to a very flexible design. If someone doesn't like 3.5" bays it should be easy enough to swap it with a 5.25". If you don't want the bay turned sideways then mount the other way around.

My one suggestion to make the design a little more flexible would be to put a fan hole on the bottom of the PSU tray so you could flip the PSU over if you didn't want the fan facing up.

Thanks for the support Slim, as I've said above, I purposely faced the PSU fan up-wards to improve air flow through the case. It may spoil the look slightly but, I believe, if the fan is there why not put it to good use? Perhaps putting a grill over the hole will improve the look?