An idea for a "sleeper build"

Critter1339 · February 10

Hey guys I was thinking of what kinda case to build a sleeper and I remember this case I had in my house when I was a kid. But I wanted to see what LMG might do. It's the Alienware Area 51 case from 2007.

Now if anyone has one already I would love to see pictures on how yall modernized it. I just want inspiration on how to do it.

freeagent · February 10

My first real sleeper was done with an Antec Sonata lol..

I removed the drive bays and cut the front out so I could stick my H100 in the front, it sat like my 360 sits in my Torrent Compact.. pretty snug. It cooled an overclocked Xeon X5690 ES on a Rampage III Formula with 6GB of SuperTalent Chrome Hypers. I initially had a GTX 570, then 2 for SLI, then I gave up an went with a 580 Matrix Platinum. Storage was OCZ Revo Drive, and whatever I could cram in to the top with the non modular PSU cables on my TX-850 lol.. On the rad I had 2x120x38s, and a 120x38 exhaust. Panaflo.. 115CFM iirc.. still got em but I am old and I like my quiet now.

thrasher_565 · February 11

sleepers normally keep the old case look and try to make cooling better in it as they tend to have bad airflow. so ied say add fans to the bottom for gpu cooling and w/e fans you can fit in the front. cut out any fan grills and posably remove all pci slot covers. if its an old case psu probly top mounted so a psu that its fan spins would be nice but most psu fans dont spin so posably have to mod it but be careful. and will vode the warranty.

could do water cooling and do and external rad too for max cooling and max original look but cost alot more.

depending on case they were alot slimmer so gpu clearance can be a problem so keep that in mind.

a more energy effecnt build would be ideal imo

Edited February 11 by thrasher_565

flibberdipper · February 12

I did this just recently with a Pavilion A6137C and cooling is for sure the biggest hurdle. In my case, the case itself isn't all that wide so my GTX 970 100ME almost completely cuts it in half (which as you could imagine is not great for airflow), and then paired with the frankly awful design of the heatsink (the fins are parallel to the edge of the card instead of perpendicular so the middle half of the heatsink doesn't do a damn thing)... not a fun time. And unfortunately flipping the PSU fan to be an intake did absolutely nothing to help it, if anything it actually hurt a bit (it dropped about 3-5w across the board since I have it temp limited to 72C). And where the 970 has a dumbass heatsink design, the side panel fan didn't really help a whole hell of a lot either, though it did make the CPU a little happier.

I do plan to continue making it more silly though, and I think my next two steps will be getting a Thermalright SI-100 which is more for noise than anything (the stock cooler has no issues keeping up with the 6700K), and the major step is going to be upgrading the GPU where I'll also be getting a blower model instead. Probably something like a 5700XT since it would be neat to have an AMD GPU for the first time in YEARS.