Project Old Growth - Retiring My Fx-8320 System Upgrading/ Wood Case accents

[MythicalSpandex]

Hello LTT community! Finally upgrading from the Fx Platform. This was not my first build, though it was my first hard tubing job. Some of you may notice the slanted tubing, the first mobo I had failed and I had this Gigabyte 970A ds3p on hand. Luckily the socket location was close enough that the original tubes fit. At the time my intentions were to just get the pc working and in a year or so upgrade and redo the loop. Well its been 5 ish years since that day and the time has come!

 

Old build

-R9 380 w/ Painted Shroud (upgraded this to a gtx1650)

-EK water block and fittings

-PETG tubing

-Alpha cool reservoir 

-XSPC Rad
-Cougar A500 psu

-Corsair sp 120's on rad

-Fractal silent series R2 exhaust fan

-White 24 pin and pcie cable extensions

-Kingston 250gb and Samsung 1tb ssd 

-Gigabyte 970A ds3p Motherboard

-Fractal Design Define C case

 

 

New Build

- GPU to be (determined) gtx 1650 for now

-R5 3600

- Stock  AMD Wraith cooler

-MSI B550m Mortar wifi Motherboard

-Cougar A500 psu

-Fractal Define C case

-Corsair sp 120 exhaust

-black Corsair fans x2 intake (not sure on the model they came with a case)

- Kingston and Samsung ssd (same as old build)

 

Moving away form liquid cooling for now. I may do a custom loop again but I specifically want to use a tower cooler. I'll be reusing the Define C case for this build with a few modifications. My goal is a "classy" aesthetic also I want to incorporate wood into this build. The top of the case has a removable panel, also there is a cut out in the bottom shroud with a removable panel. I remade these panels using mahogany and painted the rings on the corsair sp fans the match.

 

 

Waiting on motherboard and ram now.

[jaslion]

Do be carefull with airflow as the define series is made for silence but has rather low airflow (which is then counter productive because the cooler something is the quieter it runs). So I'd advise 3 front intakes to get as much air out of the small openings on the sides.

[MythicalSpandex]

Thanks for the heads up! Maybe I'll do 2 140's up front. If thermals are an issue I may just go back to water. I do want to overclock in the future.

[MythicalSpandex]

Motherboard and CPU are in! Anxious to see it post and it appears the ram is lost in shipping, so bought an 8Gb stick from the local Best Buy to get me by. Now that the motherboard is in I'm not crazy about the brushed aluminum look on the heatsinks. It will stay this way until I do some temp testing, I may paint them black if the temps are reasonable. Not planning on any RGB, though I do like the look of interior lighting. Thinking about using some mahogany to make a light diffuser of sorts. Made a quick mock up piece this morning, and, I have to say I'm digging it! The wood piece will go in front of the light strip and hopefully cause the light to splash. Additionally the piece fills that dead space nicely. Most dual fan cards seem somewhere between 10" and 11"  in length so, I will shape the piece to allow for a future GPU upgrade. 

 

 

[MythicalSpandex]

Today I finished making the light diffuser. I made it fit between the fans and motherboard tray instead of covering the cables, this way it shouldn't interfere GPU. Also I wasn't too crazy about the way the lighting looked. By placing the piece close to the LED strip I could better direct the light. NOW, while doing this I noticed the LED strip was had melted where the LEDs are! I'll be looking into ARGB lighting to find something that will work, SOO... I will not be putting LEDs against the wood for now.

 

Below are some shots of the diffuser and two shots of the case lit up. Let me know what you think, I'm open to all criticisms!

 

 

 

Here is the light diffuser in action

 

Here the light is in the top

[DJ46]

I can't wait to see the final product.

I think setting the light strip behind the diffuser to a warm white glow (like an incandescent bulb) would look awesome but I'm excited to see what you choose to do.

[MythicalSpandex]

2 hours ago, DJ46 said:

I can't wait to see the final product.

I think setting the light strip behind the diffuser to a warm white glow (like an incandescent bulb) would look awesome but I'm excited to see what you choose to do.

I agree! ARGB light should help me achieve that.

[MythicalSpandex]

Today I switch my fans around, this allowed two things.
Thing A part one. The stock case fans weren't pulling enough air through the front panel at load. I moved the Corsair sp 120's to the front of the case since they are high static pressure fans.
Thing A part two. The the cable on the sp isn't long enough to reach a fan header on the mobo. This required the fan to be plugged into a Molex connector resulting in one loud ass fan. I ran two sp 120's this way for the entire life span of my old build. It's quiet time now.
Thing B. the back of the case was rather woodless. I made a mahogany shroud that should go nicely with the plain black fans I had in front to use as exhaust. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Also have an idea for adding some wood accents onto the GPU. I stained a piece of Ash veneer to match the Mahogany (as best I could anyway) that will adhere to the shroud. I'm not sure how it will go but the GTX 1650 will be the guinea pig.

Here is a shot of the veneer and some of the pc assembled with the fan shroud.