Thread: New Case design...

I took the power supply and rotated it 90 degrees.

The bottom edge of it is aligned with the Mini ITX board, and the connectors on the bottom edge are also parallel with the ATX power connector on the motherboard (not shown).


There's about 2.5" of clearance between the top edge of the power supply and the case, sufficient room for many ports, etc.

Originally Posted by Giuliano

I was thinking that the fans would blow inwards..

The drives have 1/8" clearance between them.


But it could go either way.. could also put the fans on the other panel, and the vents behind the drives..

Well I'm just thinking you might want to pull the air out past the drives, and not blow through them into the case. 3 or 4 sata drives create quite a bit of heat. Easily the second hottest part of a computer.

Yeah, that's a good idea...

Though I wonder if the fans are pulling the air, if I need to create some kind of ducting to direct the airflow.

Added a 2.5" drive rack.

For those of you who want 4 x 3.5" drives and 4 x 2.5" drives - or just for the hell of it:




Or, 2 x 3.5" drives and 2 x 2.5" drives:



You can also do 2 x 3.5" drives and 4 2.5" drives in the same nested config.


I'm also placing holes on the bottom of the case so you can bottom mount 2 3.5" drives or 2 2.5" drives, or one of each.


The drive brackets have 6-32 threaded nut inserts in the bottom of them - you thread screws up through the holes in the bottom to secure the brackets.

This rather large image shows the mounting hole locations for the different hard disk combinations. The green dotted lines are the sketched dimensions of the 3.5" drives and their mounting holes, and the 2.5" drives and their mounting holes. The green circles are the holes.

There's 8 different possible configurations, and 32 mounting holes.

Most of them are 1/8" for 6-32 screws, about 8 of them are 3mm for the 3mm screws used in 2.5" hard disks.


It is possible to put two 3.5" drives or drive cages back to back, but it would be a tight fit - there's 1/2" of clearance between the two areas.

For just 2 3.5" drives, use one of the drive cages and put it on either side.

are you going to use a PCI-E motherboard for that card? as that is different than PCI and i don't think it will run off your riser card. thats a hell of a card though, i have the BFG 8800GTX-OC had to buy a new case to fit that mother in there, BIG card. you might have thought of what i just asked, but i didn't see a mention to it in the post. i only skimmed through it, nice design though. the raptors stripped will give you a fast boot time, and fast windows install time.

Originally Posted by bitbandit

are you going to use a PCI-E motherboard for that card? as that is different than PCI and i don't think it will run off your riser card. thats a hell of a card though, i have the BFG 8800GTX-OC had to buy a new case to fit that mother in there, BIG card. you might have thought of what i just asked, but i didn't see a mention to it in the post. i only skimmed through it, nice design though. the raptors striped will give you a fast boot time, and fast windows install time.

The slot and the riser that is over the motherboard are PCI-E slots / risers.

I found a left-angle x16 PCI-E riser that will do the job.


I haven't completely decided how many disks to have in the system, but I wanted to design for flexability.

And here's how it would look with a 8800 GTX: