The Art of Case Modding: A Journey of Experimentation and Innovation

As I began building my latest case mod, I couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement and nervousness. This project was going to be different from any other, as I had decided to cut out the vent on the inside of the case to improve airflow. The idea behind this design decision was simple: by removing the vent, I hoped to create a more even distribution of air throughout the case, which would in turn help to lower temperatures and improve overall system performance.

To achieve this goal, I opted for a larger fan, one that would be able to move a significant amount of air through the case. However, as I soon discovered, simply adding a bigger fan wasn't enough. The design of the case itself played a crucial role in determining airflow patterns, and I found myself struggling to create an optimal situation. The grill material on one side of the case seemed to be creating resistance, while the vent on the other side was limiting airflow. It was clear that further experimentation would be necessary if I wanted to achieve the desired results.

One area where I felt the design could be improved was in terms of temperature management. With a core clock speed of 4824 MHz and a package clock speed of 85.9, my system was running hot, with temperatures ranging from 81-175°F. This was a far cry from the optimal temperatures that I had seen in other builds, and it made me wonder if there was more to be done. To address this issue, I decided to remove the grill material entirely, in an effort to create a more even flow of air through the case.

As I began removing the grill material, I couldn't help but feel a sense of nostalgia wash over me. This was the same design that had been used in my earlier builds, and it was interesting to see how it had evolved over time. The removal of the grill material allowed me to create a more streamlined design, one that would allow air to flow freely through the case. However, as I soon discovered, this new design also came with its own set of challenges.

One of the biggest issues I faced was accessing certain components in the case. With the grill material removed, it became much easier for dust and debris to accumulate on sensitive electronics. This made me realize that while a more streamlined design could be beneficial, it wasn't necessarily the only solution to improving airflow.

In order to address this issue, I decided to incorporate some advanced lighting techniques into my build. Using a combination of fans and LED lights, I created an immersive experience that simulated the glow of a Proto molecule from the movie and TV show "Interstellar." The result was stunning, with the soft blue light casting an ethereal glow over the entire case.

However, as I delved deeper into this project, I realized that the lighting system itself presented its own set of challenges. With only one argb header available on the motherboard, I found myself struggling to connect multiple devices at once. This was a problem that I had anticipated, but one that required careful planning and experimentation to overcome.

In the end, it was my trusty fan control software, IQ, that saved the day. By using IQ to independently control each of my fans, I was able to create a more balanced lighting system that met my needs without breaking the bank. This experience had taught me the importance of considering multiple factors when designing a build, and how even the smallest details can make all the difference.

As I looked back on this project, I couldn't help but feel a sense of pride and accomplishment. It had been a true collaborative effort, with contributions from my team members Nick and Jay. Together, we had pushed the boundaries of what was possible in case modding, experimenting with new techniques and technologies along the way.

From 3D printing to advanced lighting systems, this build had been a true showcase for the power of creativity and innovation. It may not have resulted in a perfectly optimized system, but it had certainly been an exciting journey, one that would stay with me long after the dust settled.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enokay welcome to the final video and conclusion of the expanse PC build um I told you guys in the last one that the next time you see it will be done so that's going to be the point in today's video uh we're going to finish this off don't know how long it's going to be it's going probably take several days to be honest but we got some um serious progress and I want to get this done once and for all the air 903 Max midtower case from Monch features a 51% paracity ventilation rate pre-installed HP 140 mm argb fan and 21 built-in RGB modes for a premium feel without the premium price not interested in RGB then the air 903 Bas is just for you with its clean aesthetic and a credible component support at a price that won't have you crying to see the full list of air 903 specs from montech follow the link in the description below uh okay so what I'm working on right now is the front um this is where the Jason anante logo is going to go I'm just kind of attaching some grebles something I've also done too you'll see I even added another layer of GBL so I had the extra panel uh I think I have two panels actually we're not using and um I I cracked it right there on accident but I was kind of doing the same technique of how you can score it and snap it like you do with styring um this one right here I didn't score very well that's why you can see all the print layers like the jaggedness of it kind of looks like when you break fiberglass but anyway that so that way we're not putting anything to waste but I still have these oxygen tanks right here I could stick somewhere but uh anyway I need to get sort of adding I need to add these you know what I I got a I got an idea I got an idea cuz I I just sort of want to 3D layer this up now and build some more depth to it otherwise it just looks way too flat and I can sort of do the same thing on this panel over here too so I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut out some of these squares and things right now oh and check this out so because the rosante had the pdcs that popped out these are basically just like failinks guns on an aircraft carrier or a ship these days they are designed to just shoot down incoming like missiles and Torpedoes and stuff so I've got two of these and they're going to have rocket launchers on the side too those those are still printing I've got to airbrush these up and put them together but I'm going to be mounting a couple of these on the on the side as well cuz obviously we need guns lots of guns this is probably going to end up being a little Overkill with the way I'm going to clamp them together but anyone that builds models knows too much glue is just the right amount of glue see it the carpet tape I'm sure there's two-sided tape out there that we could have gotten a Michaels or whatever that would have been just as good but we've used this obviously and it's it's never lost its like tackiness or like its gooiness or whatever and it's just holding on little plastic panels I I'm sure there's a better product it's just what we had and some of the fun aspects of these builds is seeing what unconventional methods you can come up with just to get something done cuz that's the thing when it comes to modding and playing around like this there's not really a Right Way in a wrong way like I did read a comment of this guy that went into all the reasons why the Scorch marks are just physically incorrect because scorching doesn't happen in space you know the expanse isn't real right space is real but guess what until we go up there and start actually laser blasting stuff we're not going to know how it really looks it's all physics and Theory right please comment about how I'm doing all of the physics wrong cuz it helps boost the video and then more people can see me do it wrong I take this fan back off this fan was never intended to stay on fulltime anyway because I still have to mount the radiator and stuff to it but now that I'm almost done with all of the texturing and painting effects on here I'll be able to mount this down with the rad soon in fact I might get farther along today than I thought what oh my gosh if this build takes a month from beginning to end cuz I did do the very first part where I cut the metal and stuff a month ago they'll still be one of Jay's fastest builds ever when it comes to custom work right you can't rush art so the link fans come with these little plugs which technically are about connecting the fans together but by sticking that in there now I can airbrush fade this make it grimy like the rest and it won't won't destroy the uh contacts by covering it in paint Nick is like we need a bright colored stripe in this thing like when it was when the rosinante was disguised as a gas freighter it had like a orange panel and stuff on there when it was the mcrn ship it was black with Orange um clearly I've done the two-tone as you can see here like I'm debating doing a pinstripe in between these two so color-wise we have red which could work we've got orange which is very bright we've got yellow which could work too and then we've got like a bright neon green which also wouldn't look bad so I don't know I like I need some help here just oh and then blue which would also work and be Spacey okay so I just put down my bottles of color there that I used as a palette and then we can I think orange we tried it with the blue green yellow red orange I I just like the orange I think the Orange is a good contrast between the Grays um yellow was cool too we liked yellow red is a little bit overdone in my opinion so orange is what we're going with all right so I as much as I tried to do the stripe uh I couldn't get the very good parallel line so I've decided I'm just not going to do the the the stripe I'm not 100% against necessarily doing a color accent even if I just did like a couple lines up here or something but right now I want to move forward without getting stuck on that point I also added some CA glue to these panels here and then uh clamp them together while uh actually was these panels right here cuz this part was starting to lift a little bit you can see a little bit of the glue showing I'll just put a little spray paint over that but these were starting to kind of lift off a little bit cuz I didn't have tape right here so I ca glued that I need to make sure I didn't CA glue it down to the the side panel real quick like to make sure I get to open it which should be okay I think um did you really did you really glue it closed I did Nick as I was doing this I was like don't glue the panel clothes we were just watching a compilation of stupid people while we were at lunch you can see where it was glued anyway that's off now so I'm going to do it again I'm going to add now some CA glue down in there and clamp it while I'm doing other parts so so here's the way the gun turrets turned out that Nick print I think there's like three or four pieces 1 two 3 four five pieces technically um so I got to paint these so I'm thinking one will go like right there on that side then on the other side probably not even it'll probably be like offset somewhere else because remember on the on the ships they were just kind of all over the place so we just did two on this one and since what I have a lot left to a lot of what I have left to do is just painting we'll go ahead and uh just sort of b-roll Montage it up for that aspect and then we'll come back when it's ready to talk or I'm ready to talk and I have glue everywhere now not glue but like the tape boogers all right whatever we'll be back yeah yeah okay well I'm sure you guys are all as shocked as I am that it's done okay yes just the fact that it's done even if it had taken a year it still would have been like okay that's typical for Jay but I got it done inside of one month with more 3D printing than any of us have ever even dreamed of doing uh but anyway as you can see we've got some stuff set up here obviously we're using the Corsair link uh fans which I already explained why Phil has done some lighting configuration on here that we're going to probably uh kind of tweak a little bit more there's one other thing I would have loved to have done if I had really thought about it when we referenc the photo of what the what the engines look like they've got this almost like a white kind of like a crackling miss the effect coming off and I think it would have been neat to 3D print in the white clear that we have a cone that fits within here that has that jaggedy like fiery looking bit to it that would have just picked up the lighting from the fan and then it would have looked it would have looked like fire and we could still do that but there's no point in extending this any longer than it already is because I'm happy with the way the case mod has turned out as you can see we added the pdcs and uh Nick added some rocket launchers to that um my intake here for the power supply works perfect cuz as you can see the screws are right there needed to mount it down and so the magnet mod works perfectly on there uh let's talk about the front Phil has used his skills with uh doing some artwork to turn the rosinante into the Jon nante and then he printed this out on a stencil from our Cricut and then I transferred it onto here and painted it and just like when we did our Imperial build you can and not scratch this off if you tried in fact I tried to do my hairspray mod where I could chip it a little bit but I didn't use enough hairspray so it will not come off like I can't so we just ended up fading it by adding a little bit more gray paint on top with a very light layer um but anyway you can see the front panels are on there here's the other PDC on this side here is our fan which I moved to the exterior of the case which is now a full-size fan blowing air in here is the other flow through and it's funny too like if you put your hand right here you can actually feel the air from the graphics card coming all the way through CU remember those 120s on the other end are blowing directly on the graphics card here is our damage effect which as you can see we used the um the header on the motherboard to put I basically made a ring of light so I took an argb strip and then just hot glued it in a circle around the hole and I was going to end up I was planning on airbrushing the graphics card but the thing is the rear of the core lines up with the hole which is probably good if if the whole idea about why they put a hole on the back side of the motherboard to allow some of that CPU radiant heat to come out I guess you would have to say this would do the same thing uh maybe it's just because it's a 40 series and the 12vt high power just blew a hole right out the side of there's there's your lore right there but because the core lines up with the hole the silver and all the the the smds and stuff pick up that light which Phil is programmed kind of like a sort of a starry night between red and orange to look like fire that's how that that's how that you know effect is happening and because the rest of it's black which is a little bit of gold you can't see it through the holes there was no point in painting the graphics card which would have been irreversible so I just left it the way it was uh let's see moving forward what else can I talk about here um not a whole lot other than we learned a lot on this and getting this back on is always a pain in the butt the top is still my favorite part Nick came up with this design on his own these lubers These are functional vents because uh we wanted the top of the case to retain its functionality of air being pushed in on the graphics card part of the axial fans blow air out out the exhaust of the graphics card and that's right here on the top so if you look in the rear you can see the vents are still fully functional and you can feel the air coming out especially when these fans ramp up and then I just sort of painted the back to kind of match I didn't paint any of the components as you can see but now no matter what angle you look at this build um you can see that the theme just sort of follows it around but it turned out really really well now let's talk about temperatures and stuff the GPU temps as you might expect are pretty phenomenal I mean we've got two high pressure high RPM fans that are set to balance mode right now in uh IQ blowing fresh air directly on the graphics card that performs about as well as you would expect the one thing I want to talk about though is the CPU temps in effect I'll just go and show you GPU temps so the card is currently idling at 29 remember this is a 4080 not a 490 it's a 4080 Pro art uh the pro art comes with this particular Tiki build from Falcon uh Northwest because it's the only 4 40 series graphics card 480 and up that would fit in here because it's a more of a standard siiz card um you can see the fan look the fans are actually off on the GPU right now they're they're idle or not even idle it's off so that cooling is just from the these fans blowing directly on it and it'll max out at around 70 or so which is like really really good now the thing is and Falcon had reached out to me too to make sure I had thought of this and I had when it comes to the 120 AIO as an intake it has a lot of pressure to overcome if I'm blasting these 12s as an intake so two 120s pushing air in any air not exhausting out the vents which may or may not end up being an issue later on we'll just have to do our full testing which is going to actually be the next video which is about cooling not about the build so much but about sff Cooling and some of the stuff I'm going to try out if this can't if this RPM can't over match or at least match the amount of pressure coming through this chassis then we're going to have an inefficiency here with our AIO remember I have a 120 AO I am asking a lot of an acch 120 AIO to keep a 7800 x3d cool in any sort of CPU intensive task um when it comes to Graphics though as you can see we're hovering at like 65c right now and these fans are not even going all that fast and crazy enough if I had like a thermal camera you would see there is a fair amount of heat radiating out of Phil put your hand right here like oh yeah it's realistic fire now it's working as intended let's see what happens now with the CPU and that's a slightly different story um score-wise it's Landing where it was before I did any of the mods but I think there's room for improvement and the temperatures are up a little bit and there's a few reasons for that I think one this grill right here its paracity is not great because these this is louvered at an angle so one of the things that we're going to be testing the next video for temperatures is I made a spacer to move it away from the blades a little bit to see if we can't get a little bit of a bigger cushion of air right in front of the blades it'll help with Acoustics it'll also help with um a little bit of extra air flow two I'm probably going to go ahead and cut out the vent on the inside so remember there is still the grill material on one side and then I've got this vent on the other so although I put a bigger fan in here I might not have actually created a better situation by having the little bit of resistance on to one side and probably a fair amount of resistance here if this ends up being a big problem which means I'll try by removing the the grill entirely as well if we see a big Improvement in temps we'll just redesign this reprint it repaint it put it on there our cores are in the low 80 or high 7s low 80s with the package at 86 now I believe the package before you can hear the fan is ramped up it's doing its job but I definitely feel like it's not flowing as well as it could and I do think a lot of that has to do with the design of this great so we we're going to have to play with this I think we're still hitting 4824 MHz 4800 MHz this is all core by the way and our package is at 85.9 and all of our cores our CCD is at 75 and our cores are between 81 and the and the low and there's a 17574 so we lost a little bit cuz we were right around 18,000 so I do think that and by the way I've got IQ and Ora and all that running so that's going to account for some of the score dip but I do think we can do a better job here both both acoustically and temperature- wise and that will be in a separate video because it's just going to be fun learning about some airf flow techniques it's not going to be it has nothing to do with like necessarily the case mod this is now just airflow physics and I want to play around with that anyway I hope you guys have enjoyed the expans build there's one aspect to this I wasn't able to incorporate that I want to try later but I did not want to hold up the video anymore that's going to be getting some protomolecule on here now my idea was to backlight some like hot glue drips and stuff to make it look like the glowing Proto molecule F cuz remember in the movie/tv show books uh it's mostly black with a lot of like glowing blue like luminescence to it it's actually very difficult to get that technique the way I want part of the problem is the fact that this Asus motherboard that's in here which is a b650 uh I think it's b650 e I think is the I think it's the E whatever it's a b650 it has one argb header Gen 2 RGB by the way and a single 12volt header now almost all devices these days are 5volt argb now it's a Gen 2 device which means the header could split the signal between multiple Gen 2 devices and individually control them the problem is none of my devices are Gen 2 and when I look them up online there's kind of a limited selection so it's sort of like this is on the cusp of a new generation of RGB that none of my stuff that I have works with so I opted to fortunately be saved by the fact that I'm using IQ for the fans because it's independent on lighting and then I used that header for the fire effects which to me was more important than the prot molecule and I'll figure that out later anyway hope you guys have enjoyed this build I hope it's given you some ideas maybe for your own case mods and you guys know I love to take my model building techniques and utilize them in PCS when possible and a lot of you guys said this was very refreshing content you guys enjoyed seeing and it was different than what you're used to seeing in the tech space it's been a long time since we've done a case mod so there you go it's also the first time we've utilized 3D printing in it which would not have been possible without uh our our 3D printers so also too Nick did a great job at modeling a lot of this taking my ideas and turning it into an actual physical tangible thing uh all three of us played a huge part in making this build what it is so this was a huge team effort not just like look at what Jay can do so I mean with the exception of putting it together painting it everything else was a team effort so thanks for watching guys give this video a like if you appreciated it there was a lot of time and effort that went into this and I would love to do more stuff like this uh because it's just fun to let the brain juices leak out my ear the creative juices whatever I molecule in my head probably no that's just paint fumesokay welcome to the final video and conclusion of the expanse PC build um I told you guys in the last one that the next time you see it will be done so that's going to be the point in today's video uh we're going to finish this off don't know how long it's going to be it's going probably take several days to be honest but we got some um serious progress and I want to get this done once and for all the air 903 Max midtower case from Monch features a 51% paracity ventilation rate pre-installed HP 140 mm argb fan and 21 built-in RGB modes for a premium feel without the premium price not interested in RGB then the air 903 Bas is just for you with its clean aesthetic and a credible component support at a price that won't have you crying to see the full list of air 903 specs from montech follow the link in the description below uh okay so what I'm working on right now is the front um this is where the Jason anante logo is going to go I'm just kind of attaching some grebles something I've also done too you'll see I even added another layer of GBL so I had the extra panel uh I think I have two panels actually we're not using and um I I cracked it right there on accident but I was kind of doing the same technique of how you can score it and snap it like you do with styring um this one right here I didn't score very well that's why you can see all the print layers like the jaggedness of it kind of looks like when you break fiberglass but anyway that so that way we're not putting anything to waste but I still have these oxygen tanks right here I could stick somewhere but uh anyway I need to get sort of adding I need to add these you know what I I got a I got an idea I got an idea cuz I I just sort of want to 3D layer this up now and build some more depth to it otherwise it just looks way too flat and I can sort of do the same thing on this panel over here too so I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut out some of these squares and things right now oh and check this out so because the rosante had the pdcs that popped out these are basically just like failinks guns on an aircraft carrier or a ship these days they are designed to just shoot down incoming like missiles and Torpedoes and stuff so I've got two of these and they're going to have rocket launchers on the side too those those are still printing I've got to airbrush these up and put them together but I'm going to be mounting a couple of these on the on the side as well cuz obviously we need guns lots of guns this is probably going to end up being a little Overkill with the way I'm going to clamp them together but anyone that builds models knows too much glue is just the right amount of glue see it the carpet tape I'm sure there's two-sided tape out there that we could have gotten a Michaels or whatever that would have been just as good but we've used this obviously and it's it's never lost its like tackiness or like its gooiness or whatever and it's just holding on little plastic panels I I'm sure there's a better product it's just what we had and some of the fun aspects of these builds is seeing what unconventional methods you can come up with just to get something done cuz that's the thing when it comes to modding and playing around like this there's not really a Right Way in a wrong way like I did read a comment of this guy that went into all the reasons why the Scorch marks are just physically incorrect because scorching doesn't happen in space you know the expanse isn't real right space is real but guess what until we go up there and start actually laser blasting stuff we're not going to know how it really looks it's all physics and Theory right please comment about how I'm doing all of the physics wrong cuz it helps boost the video and then more people can see me do it wrong I take this fan back off this fan was never intended to stay on fulltime anyway because I still have to mount the radiator and stuff to it but now that I'm almost done with all of the texturing and painting effects on here I'll be able to mount this down with the rad soon in fact I might get farther along today than I thought what oh my gosh if this build takes a month from beginning to end cuz I did do the very first part where I cut the metal and stuff a month ago they'll still be one of Jay's fastest builds ever when it comes to custom work right you can't rush art so the link fans come with these little plugs which technically are about connecting the fans together but by sticking that in there now I can airbrush fade this make it grimy like the rest and it won't won't destroy the uh contacts by covering it in paint Nick is like we need a bright colored stripe in this thing like when it was when the rosinante was disguised as a gas freighter it had like a orange panel and stuff on there when it was the mcrn ship it was black with Orange um clearly I've done the two-tone as you can see here like I'm debating doing a pinstripe in between these two so color-wise we have red which could work we've got orange which is very bright we've got yellow which could work too and then we've got like a bright neon green which also wouldn't look bad so I don't know I like I need some help here just oh and then blue which would also work and be Spacey okay so I just put down my bottles of color there that I used as a palette and then we can I think orange we tried it with the blue green yellow red orange I I just like the orange I think the Orange is a good contrast between the Grays um yellow was cool too we liked yellow red is a little bit overdone in my opinion so orange is what we're going with all right so I as much as I tried to do the stripe uh I couldn't get the very good parallel line so I've decided I'm just not going to do the the the stripe I'm not 100% against necessarily doing a color accent even if I just did like a couple lines up here or something but right now I want to move forward without getting stuck on that point I also added some CA glue to these panels here and then uh clamp them together while uh actually was these panels right here cuz this part was starting to lift a little bit you can see a little bit of the glue showing I'll just put a little spray paint over that but these were starting to kind of lift off a little bit cuz I didn't have tape right here so I ca glued that I need to make sure I didn't CA glue it down to the the side panel real quick like to make sure I get to open it which should be okay I think um did you really did you really glue it closed I did Nick as I was doing this I was like don't glue the panel clothes we were just watching a compilation of stupid people while we were at lunch you can see where it was glued anyway that's off now so I'm going to do it again I'm going to add now some CA glue down in there and clamp it while I'm doing other parts so so here's the way the gun turrets turned out that Nick print I think there's like three or four pieces 1 two 3 four five pieces technically um so I got to paint these so I'm thinking one will go like right there on that side then on the other side probably not even it'll probably be like offset somewhere else because remember on the on the ships they were just kind of all over the place so we just did two on this one and since what I have a lot left to a lot of what I have left to do is just painting we'll go ahead and uh just sort of b-roll Montage it up for that aspect and then we'll come back when it's ready to talk or I'm ready to talk and I have glue everywhere now not glue but like the tape boogers all right whatever we'll be back yeah yeah okay well I'm sure you guys are all as shocked as I am that it's done okay yes just the fact that it's done even if it had taken a year it still would have been like okay that's typical for Jay but I got it done inside of one month with more 3D printing than any of us have ever even dreamed of doing uh but anyway as you can see we've got some stuff set up here obviously we're using the Corsair link uh fans which I already explained why Phil has done some lighting configuration on here that we're going to probably uh kind of tweak a little bit more there's one other thing I would have loved to have done if I had really thought about it when we referenc the photo of what the what the engines look like they've got this almost like a white kind of like a crackling miss the effect coming off and I think it would have been neat to 3D print in the white clear that we have a cone that fits within here that has that jaggedy like fiery looking bit to it that would have just picked up the lighting from the fan and then it would have looked it would have looked like fire and we could still do that but there's no point in extending this any longer than it already is because I'm happy with the way the case mod has turned out as you can see we added the pdcs and uh Nick added some rocket launchers to that um my intake here for the power supply works perfect cuz as you can see the screws are right there needed to mount it down and so the magnet mod works perfectly on there uh let's talk about the front Phil has used his skills with uh doing some artwork to turn the rosinante into the Jon nante and then he printed this out on a stencil from our Cricut and then I transferred it onto here and painted it and just like when we did our Imperial build you can and not scratch this off if you tried in fact I tried to do my hairspray mod where I could chip it a little bit but I didn't use enough hairspray so it will not come off like I can't so we just ended up fading it by adding a little bit more gray paint on top with a very light layer um but anyway you can see the front panels are on there here's the other PDC on this side here is our fan which I moved to the exterior of the case which is now a full-size fan blowing air in here is the other flow through and it's funny too like if you put your hand right here you can actually feel the air from the graphics card coming all the way through CU remember those 120s on the other end are blowing directly on the graphics card here is our damage effect which as you can see we used the um the header on the motherboard to put I basically made a ring of light so I took an argb strip and then just hot glued it in a circle around the hole and I was going to end up I was planning on airbrushing the graphics card but the thing is the rear of the core lines up with the hole which is probably good if if the whole idea about why they put a hole on the back side of the motherboard to allow some of that CPU radiant heat to come out I guess you would have to say this would do the same thing uh maybe it's just because it's a 40 series and the 12vt high power just blew a hole right out the side of there's there's your lore right there but because the core lines up with the hole the silver and all the the the smds and stuff pick up that light which Phil is programmed kind of like a sort of a starry night between red and orange to look like fire that's how that that's how that you know effect is happening and because the rest of it's black which is a little bit of gold you can't see it through the holes there was no point in painting the graphics card which would have been irreversible so I just left it the way it was uh let's see moving forward what else can I talk about here um not a whole lot other than we learned a lot on this and getting this back on is always a pain in the butt the top is still my favorite part Nick came up with this design on his own these lubers These are functional vents because uh we wanted the top of the case to retain its functionality of air being pushed in on the graphics card part of the axial fans blow air out out the exhaust of the graphics card and that's right here on the top so if you look in the rear you can see the vents are still fully functional and you can feel the air coming out especially when these fans ramp up and then I just sort of painted the back to kind of match I didn't paint any of the components as you can see but now no matter what angle you look at this build um you can see that the theme just sort of follows it around but it turned out really really well now let's talk about temperatures and stuff the GPU temps as you might expect are pretty phenomenal I mean we've got two high pressure high RPM fans that are set to balance mode right now in uh IQ blowing fresh air directly on the graphics card that performs about as well as you would expect the one thing I want to talk about though is the CPU temps in effect I'll just go and show you GPU temps so the card is currently idling at 29 remember this is a 4080 not a 490 it's a 4080 Pro art uh the pro art comes with this particular Tiki build from Falcon uh Northwest because it's the only 4 40 series graphics card 480 and up that would fit in here because it's a more of a standard siiz card um you can see the fan look the fans are actually off on the GPU right now they're they're idle or not even idle it's off so that cooling is just from the these fans blowing directly on it and it'll max out at around 70 or so which is like really really good now the thing is and Falcon had reached out to me too to make sure I had thought of this and I had when it comes to the 120 AIO as an intake it has a lot of pressure to overcome if I'm blasting these 12s as an intake so two 120s pushing air in any air not exhausting out the vents which may or may not end up being an issue later on we'll just have to do our full testing which is going to actually be the next video which is about cooling not about the build so much but about sff Cooling and some of the stuff I'm going to try out if this can't if this RPM can't over match or at least match the amount of pressure coming through this chassis then we're going to have an inefficiency here with our AIO remember I have a 120 AO I am asking a lot of an acch 120 AIO to keep a 7800 x3d cool in any sort of CPU intensive task um when it comes to Graphics though as you can see we're hovering at like 65c right now and these fans are not even going all that fast and crazy enough if I had like a thermal camera you would see there is a fair amount of heat radiating out of Phil put your hand right here like oh yeah it's realistic fire now it's working as intended let's see what happens now with the CPU and that's a slightly different story um score-wise it's Landing where it was before I did any of the mods but I think there's room for improvement and the temperatures are up a little bit and there's a few reasons for that I think one this grill right here its paracity is not great because these this is louvered at an angle so one of the things that we're going to be testing the next video for temperatures is I made a spacer to move it away from the blades a little bit to see if we can't get a little bit of a bigger cushion of air right in front of the blades it'll help with Acoustics it'll also help with um a little bit of extra air flow two I'm probably going to go ahead and cut out the vent on the inside so remember there is still the grill material on one side and then I've got this vent on the other so although I put a bigger fan in here I might not have actually created a better situation by having the little bit of resistance on to one side and probably a fair amount of resistance here if this ends up being a big problem which means I'll try by removing the the grill entirely as well if we see a big Improvement in temps we'll just redesign this reprint it repaint it put it on there our cores are in the low 80 or high 7s low 80s with the package at 86 now I believe the package before you can hear the fan is ramped up it's doing its job but I definitely feel like it's not flowing as well as it could and I do think a lot of that has to do with the design of this great so we we're going to have to play with this I think we're still hitting 4824 MHz 4800 MHz this is all core by the way and our package is at 85.9 and all of our cores our CCD is at 75 and our cores are between 81 and the and the low and there's a 17574 so we lost a little bit cuz we were right around 18,000 so I do think that and by the way I've got IQ and Ora and all that running so that's going to account for some of the score dip but I do think we can do a better job here both both acoustically and temperature- wise and that will be in a separate video because it's just going to be fun learning about some airf flow techniques it's not going to be it has nothing to do with like necessarily the case mod this is now just airflow physics and I want to play around with that anyway I hope you guys have enjoyed the expans build there's one aspect to this I wasn't able to incorporate that I want to try later but I did not want to hold up the video anymore that's going to be getting some protomolecule on here now my idea was to backlight some like hot glue drips and stuff to make it look like the glowing Proto molecule F cuz remember in the movie/tv show books uh it's mostly black with a lot of like glowing blue like luminescence to it it's actually very difficult to get that technique the way I want part of the problem is the fact that this Asus motherboard that's in here which is a b650 uh I think it's b650 e I think is the I think it's the E whatever it's a b650 it has one argb header Gen 2 RGB by the way and a single 12volt header now almost all devices these days are 5volt argb now it's a Gen 2 device which means the header could split the signal between multiple Gen 2 devices and individually control them the problem is none of my devices are Gen 2 and when I look them up online there's kind of a limited selection so it's sort of like this is on the cusp of a new generation of RGB that none of my stuff that I have works with so I opted to fortunately be saved by the fact that I'm using IQ for the fans because it's independent on lighting and then I used that header for the fire effects which to me was more important than the prot molecule and I'll figure that out later anyway hope you guys have enjoyed this build I hope it's given you some ideas maybe for your own case mods and you guys know I love to take my model building techniques and utilize them in PCS when possible and a lot of you guys said this was very refreshing content you guys enjoyed seeing and it was different than what you're used to seeing in the tech space it's been a long time since we've done a case mod so there you go it's also the first time we've utilized 3D printing in it which would not have been possible without uh our our 3D printers so also too Nick did a great job at modeling a lot of this taking my ideas and turning it into an actual physical tangible thing uh all three of us played a huge part in making this build what it is so this was a huge team effort not just like look at what Jay can do so I mean with the exception of putting it together painting it everything else was a team effort so thanks for watching guys give this video a like if you appreciated it there was a lot of time and effort that went into this and I would love to do more stuff like this uh because it's just fun to let the brain juices leak out my ear the creative juices whatever I molecule in my head probably no that's just paint fumes\n"