F4DE: Part 1

F4DE was my first real casemod, before I had only made scratchbuilds. However, I found Cubitek’s Mini Cube and I fell in love. The size, the layout and the aluminium, it still had some small fixes to be done, but that is what modding is about.

In this first part of the buildlog I will go through how I did some mods to the case and how I started designing the layout for my setup.

So this was where everything started, with the Cubitek Mini Cube, a mini-itx motherboard and some other hardware, full list here:

MB: MSI Z77I
CPU: Intel I5 3550
GPU: EVGA GTX460 SE
RAM: 2x4gb Corsair Dominator Platinum
SSD: Samsung 840 120gb
PSU: Be-Quiet! Dark Power Pro P10 550W
CASE: Cubitek Mini Cube

What I started to do was to install hardware to see where I wanted to do cuts and how I wanted to design the layout. As the Cubitek did not have any fan intakes in the front and I wanted to watercool, I had to measure out where to cut out in the front.

I bought Aquacomputers stunning 240mm fan-grill and measured out after that, then I cut out the rough shape with a jigsaw and filed down the edges.

As the inside of the case was plain aluminium I had to take apart the case and paint it. I started of with primer for aluminium and then went on with the black paint and finished it off with a matt clearcoat.

On the inside I wanted to hide the power-supply, so I cut out two pieces of acrylic to use as a PSU-shroud, it was painted black as well.

I used a GTX 460 in this build so the blocks for it from EKWB was with their older designs, which I like much more than the new designs. However, I did not want it to be clear, so I removed the acrylic piece and painted that black too.

The nickel-plated backplate on this graphics card just looks awesome.

Finally I did a little mod to the graphics card, the connector for the power was so close to the PSU, so instead of routing the cable on the back, I resoldered new cables that was short and went directly to the PSU.

That was all for this first part, in part two I will show you how I assembled the watercooling and how the first revision of F4DE looked like.