SENTRY: Console-sized gaming PC case project

[SaperPL]

 

[SaperPL]

 

[ZombiPL]

only few hours left

[Beeeyeee]

The HYYYYYPE

 

[Dr NO NO]

So, although I have bought the case, I have certain questions about the thermals. I'm new to desktops (have built a Node202) and can't really make heads or tails out of the stuff they have posted regarding thermals on the forums. Can, I actually use this as a 1080p gaming machine with a gtx1070 and i5 6600k or will this only be usable as a highpowered media machine? I ask in terms of thermals, I understand the physical limitations of this case. Thanks

[Beeeyeee]

1 hour ago, Dr NO NO said:

So, although I have bought the case, I have certain questions about the thermals. I'm new to desktops (have built a Node202) and can't really make heads or tails out of the stuff they have posted regarding thermals on the forums. Can, I actually use this as a 1080p gaming machine with a gtx1070 and i5 6600k or will this only be usable as a highpowered media machine? I ask in terms of thermals, I understand the physical limitations of this case. Thanks

the 1070 should be fine but your problem is going to be CPU cooler height. I highly recommend a non-k skew or even a low power skew. CPU performance these days doesn't matter nearly as much as it used to. As long as its 4 cores and 3+ Ghtz it'll run anything

[ZombiPL]

We just made an update through the indiegogo newsletter system, so i'm also posting it here:

 

It's time for the first update about current state
of Sentry manufacturing process.

After long wait, this week we received your contributions from Indiegogo. Immediately we started making orders for Sentry components. At this moment we ordered parts which need the most time to be manufactured and delivered:
- Steel body of Sentry,
- PCI-E riser,
- USB 3.0 extension cable.

Thanks to the bigger order, we could talk with our suppliers to make some improvements that contributors asked about:
- USB 3.0 cable will be manufactured in the black colour (previous one was blue), with only USB sockets in blue, which will make the cable less visible through the vents and hopefully will match aesthetic of other black cables inside your case.

- Power button cables will be manufactured with additional cable sleeving. Also power and led connectors will have printed descriptions instead of paper labels.

During the waiting time for first parts to come, we are improving some other elements, which will be needed in the later  production stage. For example, we have decided to switch the idea of using bubble wrap or packing peanuts to the newly designed transport foams. As you know, Sentry will be packed in the foil bag and its own carton box. We will put this whole box in the transport foam and this construction will be inserted in another, bigger transport box.

We are thinking about making additional package protection against water and all kinds of moisture, but we will see if we will be able to get the special foiling machine on time. This is not a must, but we think, if there is a time and possibility to improve something, we can check it.

What is more, we designed the internal transportation process using euro paletes and cargo boxes, so we will be able to transport Sentry steel parts safely without harm from our manufacturer to our assembling facility.

It looks like everything is going in the right direction. Even considering the long waiting time for the bank transfer from Indiegogo, we still think we will be able to start the shipment process in the April (so according to the plan). 

Meanwhile, as many of you know, in Poland we had Intel Extreme Masters 2017 event. We were asked by Intel to send them some of our prototypes for their exhibition made in press showroom. Some of the photos can be found below:

We will try to make more frequent updates, so stay tuned.

[SaperPL]

I've got a little request to all of you - I'd like to poll you on your CPU platform of choice to get some data we could potentially use in talks with hardware vendors if we are to seek samples for testing and maybe cooperation.

 

Before deciding on your platform, It would be good for you to consider few things about Ryzen vs Intel:
- Ryzen 7 should give you more background horsepower if you don't want to close all your work while taking a break for gaming.
- Ryzen 7 should give you pure CPU horsepower for additional workload like streaming regardless of the task
- Kaby Lake iGPU should give you optimizations for specific software like streaming but that's not perfect for twitch right now
- Kaby Lake should give you more pure horsepower in gaming through higher clocks
- Broadwell-E is an old platform without support for many currently popular features
- Broadwell-E is definitely not recommended for Sentry because of 140W TDP
- Ryzen 7 benchmarks were made mostly in overclocking scenarios 1800X 95W vs 7700K 95W vs 6900K 140W, while we should be interested in comparison 1700 65W vs 7700 65W for Sentry
- Ryzen 7 benchmarks were made on fresh and clear windows systems, but AMD boasted that additional cores will prevent framerate drops that occur most likely on not so fresh and clear systems
- Ryzen 5 should be really price competitive to Kaby Lake 7600K/7700K
- More cores may be significant in the future game titles for DX12, but so far the changes to utilise more cores are progressing slowly on not so many game engines.
- Since Ryzen is fresh and new platform, the boards are currently getting bios updates and microcode updates and the test results may not represent final performance of those units, while there's not much to improve in Kaby Lake since intel's architecture didn't change much from last and even few previous generations

I've made a straw-poll for this here:

http://www.strawpoll.me/12466689
 

[mach]

5 minutes ago, SaperPL said:

snip

 

My current skylake system is 100% compatible with the sentry (purposely)

It was built 3 months ago and ryzen was not out at that time.

If I have the choice now I think I'm joining red team

 

So you are asking people which platform they prefer, I would prefer a ryzen system but I don't have a choice anymore

[SaperPL]

I'm asking what are you currently going to go for with Sentry 

[Narnash]

Aiming for Ryzen 5 .... but currently under a i7 4790T (45 TDP). I may build a moded a cooling solution out of some server full copper heatsinks, one of my serveral AM3 backplates and a nice noctua industrial fan but we will see.

[ej24]

20 hours ago, Narnash said:

Aiming for Ryzen 5 .... but currently under a i7 4790T (45 TDP). I may build a moded a cooling solution out of some server full copper heatsinks, one of my serveral AM3 backplates and a nice noctua industrial fan but we will see.

Nice! The i7 4790t is probably my favorite cpu ever. More than my 4790k. It's a cool, efficient beast of a cpu. It's why I have two of them. It'd be great for Sentry so don't replace it too quickly. I'm hoping AMD comes out with lower wattage variations of their ryzen cpu's. 

 

As for my Sentry set up I'll be sticking with my 4790K haswell system until we start seeing a big shift in things like i/o. For example, I waited until haswell to upgrade because by that point you didn't have just one USB 3.0 port like in previous platforms,  you have 6. Currently usb type C is where usb 3 was years ago. I don't want to be stuck with just one USB C port if/when everything goes to usb C. I'll wait until boards have 2-4 type C, and perhaps 2 or 3 m.2 slots for nvme drives (as Sata is slowly phased out). We're just in a period of transition to lot of new i/o. We'll see how both AMD and Intel handle the change towards new interfaces. I anticipate upgrading in about 2 years to which ever company has the most compelling platform. 

[Narnash]

12 hours ago, ej24 said:

Nice! The i7 4790t is probably my favorite cpu ever. More than my 4790k. It's a cool, efficient beast of a cpu. It's why I have two of them. It'd be great for Sentry so don't replace it too quickly. I'm hoping AMD comes out with lower wattage variations of their ryzen cpu's. 

 

As for my Sentry set up I'll be sticking with my 4790K haswell system until we start seeing a big shift in things like i/o. For example, I waited until haswell to upgrade because by that point you didn't have just one USB 3.0 port like in previous platforms,  you have 6. Currently usb type C is where usb 3 was years ago. I don't want to be stuck with just one USB C port if/when everything goes to usb C. I'll wait until boards have 2-4 type C, and perhaps 2 or 3 m.2 slots for nvme drives (as Sata is slowly phased out). We're just in a period of transition to lot of new i/o. We'll see how both AMD and Intel handle the change towards new interfaces. I anticipate upgrading in about 2 years to which ever company has the most compelling platform. 

Basicly for normal gaming alone  I'm totally fine with the 4790t, but I would like to jump in some recording/streaming together with my Vive. And due the better quality espacially on lower bitrates with CPU encoding I would like to have a bit more threads.

And I think that Ryzen should be a little upgrade in performance, too. Boost clock and and base clock is a difference ... Anyhow I will wait for AMD R5 and nice ITX boards and dicide than.

 

PS: I really like the I7 4790T,  I think about to build a ultra thin PC since I have a Asus Q87T laying around anyway, the 4790T would fit in this one very nicely.

[ej24]

6 hours ago, Narnash said:

Basicly for normal gaming alone  I'm totally fine with the 4790t, but I would like to jump in some recording/streaming together with my Vive. And due the better quality espacially on lower bitrates with CPU encoding I would like to have a bit more threads.

And I think that Ryzen should be a little upgrade in performance, too. Boost clock and and base clock is a difference ... Anyhow I will wait for AMD R5 and nice ITX boards and dicide than.

 

PS: I really like the I7 4790T,  I think about to build a ultra thin PC since I have a Asus Q87T laying around anyway, the 4790T would fit in this one very nicely.

Yeah, there's no substitute for extra cores. I have one of my 4790T's on a Gigabyte Q87tn board at work, it's great! I definitely recommend the tiny Silverstone pt13 case for a nice little beast the size of a book. 

 

It'll be interesting to see how the 6 core ryzen cpu's perform. Regardless of how they stack up to Intel they'll be great for sentry at just 65w. 

[ZombiPL]

Update after 2nd week of Sentry manufacturing process.

 

This week was also very busy. You probably remember, we were testing prototypes of some components. Here are the results:

a) new power button cables with professional sleeving:

b) new transport foam:

We also made "some" orders. Here's a list:
- IEC power cables,
- power buttons with new professional wires sleeving, 
- laser engraved aluminium labels,
- aluminium 2,4 mm rivets for engraved labels,
- all types of M3 mounting screws (nearly 100 000 pcs),
- binding screws for mounting the vertical stand,
- rubber O-rings for vertical stand,
- plastic feet for horizontal mounting,
- plastic covers for holes unused in vertical position,
- PCI slot covers,
- rubbers for fastening internal cables,
- silica gels,
- industrial glues (Loctite 243 and Loctite 480),
- Sentry transport foil bag,
- zipper foil bags,
- printing tapes for thermal small labels printer,
- big labels for thermal printing of shipping information,
- thermal printer for printing shipping labels,
- black stretch foil for packaging purposes,
- packaging tapes,
- transport baskets for internal transportation process,
- 2 mm allen wrench.

On Friday we sent instructions to our metal parts manufacturer how to pack everything on the euro pallets (we mentioned it before). At this moment we are waiting for our first two Sentry v1.1 preproduction prototypes. Our subcontractor will manufacture steel elements, and after our quality control he will make those over 1000 Sentry cases according to those 2 checked units (one painted black and one prepared for painting white in external paint shop).

Finally, you asked if the delay made by indiegogo in sending your contributions will influence the starting time of our package shipping. At this point we do not really know, but we can assure you that we are doing our best (including working 13-16 hours a day) to start sending your Sentry cases according to the plan, in April. If we will notice a situation where something will slow us down, as always we will let you know.

[FAQBytes]

On 3/11/2017 at 1:31 PM, ZombiPL said:

-snip-

On 3/11/2017 at 1:31 PM, ZombiPL said:

-snip-

 

Super excited for this case, but hopefully shipping won't cost my other arm. I can only afford so much as a poor college student on a ramen diet.

Regardless, I think I'm going sentry over s4 mini due to better GPU support and no power brick.

Keep up the good work. I'm excited to get one of my own and paint it in my style. I'll be sure to give you guys plenty of photos, not that there won't be plenty of others doing the same thing.

 

Also, super glad you are going with closed cell foam. Just feels more premium to me.

[Kevinclon]

Is there any way to get a white led for the case shipped instead of red?

 

or is it an easy diy switch. 

[SaperPL]

Easy DIY switch, we've talked about many times already. Look up 16mm anti-vandal momentary non-locking switch on ebay or aliexpress.

[ZombiPL]

3rd week of Sentry manufacturing process

 

This week, just like previous weeks, we spent on making orders and receiving packages.

From our metal parts subcontractor we received our first four Sentry v1.1 preproduction prototypes (two painted black and two prepared for painting white in external paint shop), which we mentioned in the last update. We measured them and installed our pc parts there. We have to say, those four units are so far the best we received in terms of dimensions and overall quality. And your cases will be the same, because manufacturing machines were calibrated according to those four units. We gave the green light to our subcontractor and we are waiting for the first transport of steel elements (1st week of April).

A lot of time we spent on receiving, checking, analyzing and counting the packages from our orders. We already received:
- aluminium 2,4 mm rivets for engraved labels,
- all types of M3 mounting screws,
- binding screws for mounting the vertical stand,
- rubber O-rings for vertical stand,
- rubbers for fastening internal cables,
- silica gels,
- industrial glues (Loctite 243 and Loctite 480),
- Sentry transport foil bag,
- zipper foil bags,
- printing tapes for thermal small labels printer,
- big labels for thermal printing of shipping information,
- thermal printer for printing shipping labels,
- black stretch foil for packaging purposes,
- packaging tapes,
- transport baskets for internal transportation process.

(click on the image to zoom-in)

Also some new orders were made:
- steel parts for our newly designed rubber-cutting machine. We will use it to make rubber feet for Sentry vertical stand,
- special software dedicated for handling and gathering the shipment information and to contact with customs services,
- printed carton boxes,
- accessory carton boxes,
- shipping boxes.

Many ordered parts which we mentioned before need 3-4 weeks of manufacturing, so next two weeks will be fun.

[FAQBytes]

On 3/18/2017 at 6:46 PM, ZombiPL said:

-Snip-

I think a big thing that needs to be worked out is working with shipping companies to decrease costs, unless you have already done so.

 

Shipping is a scary thing for customers, especially over $30, and can decrease sales by over 20% in some instances, especially when over 10% of the overall costs. I think getting that down would greatly increase sales. Even raising the price to $260/265 with free shipping may help.

 

Have you taken a look at Fulfillment by Amazon? I think getting it up on Amazon would bring it a little further out of the "Niche" category, and take some of the scariness away from working with a seller nobody knows. I'd say that is another 20% sales, with ~70% overlap. Generally speaking, Amazon has a huge amount of leverage over shipping companies to negotiate prices since it is so much volume that is fulfilled through Amazon. Not to mention that this also gives Amazon Prime 2-day shipping in many areas. 

 

This would qualify as either Large Standard Size (Any packaged item that is 20 lb. or less with its longest side 18" or less, its shortest side 8" or less, and its median side 14" or less)( $3.96 + $0.39/lb over 2 lb) or Small Over Sized (Any packaged unit that is 70 lb. or less with its longest side 60" or less, its median side 30" or less, and its longest side plus girth 130 inches or less.)($6.69 + $0.35/lb over 2 lb). 

 

It's just something to look into if you haven't already. (I'm sure you have, but I'm just double checking)

 

EDIT: Boy it's been a long time since you originally said $50 for it.

[ZombiPL]

9 hours ago, FAQBytes said:

I think a big thing that needs to be worked out is working with shipping companies to decrease costs, unless you have already done so.

 

Shipping is a scary thing for customers, especially over $30, and can decrease sales by over 20% in some instances, especially when over 10% of the overall costs. I think getting that down would greatly increase sales. Even raising the price to $260/265 with free shipping may help.

 

Have you taken a look at Fulfillment by Amazon? I think getting it up on Amazon would bring it a little further out of the "Niche" category, and take some of the scariness away from working with a seller nobody knows. I'd say that is another 20% sales, with ~70% overlap. Generally speaking, Amazon has a huge amount of leverage over shipping companies to negotiate prices since it is so much volume that is fulfilled through Amazon. Not to mention that this also gives Amazon Prime 2-day shipping in many areas. 

We have 2 sizes of our packages:

- 600x400x150mm, 5kg, (single Sentry)

- 600x400x300mm, 9kg. (double-pack) 

 

Those are really big and heavy boxes  Before the indiegogo campaign we received many shipping offers with pricing between $20 and $160 USD. We talked with many people who wrote to us, about which type of shipping they would like to see, and most of them said, because they are waiting so long for this case (over 2,5 years) they don't mind getting slower, cheaper transport than ultra-fast and ultra expensive. We checked many options and picked the one which was the cheapest one from the offers which included package insurance, tracking and delivery confirmation. Finally, something like 70% of countries had shipping cost between $22-27 USD for a single-pack. We think this is the best we could do with such big boxes. There is one option we could use to make transport a little bit cheaper. We could try to send packages country-by-country. It means, the time of your order wouldn't decide about the time of the shipment, because we would be shipping all cases together, one country at a time. We could do that, but people wanted to feel that when they make an order faster, then they will receive their Sentry faster. That is why we think we picked the optimal decision.

 

9 hours ago, FAQBytes said:

EDIT: Boy it's been a long time since you originally said $50 for it.

Heh, you are right  But since that time (2014) people asked to add more and more things to the final design. At the beginning we were talking about simple steel box to fill with your own stuff which you could find on Amazon or eBay, and now we have a fully professional, complex product, which includes all cables, screws, buttons, rubbers, etc., etc. All of this, including small batch, logistics, many fees, taxes and similar things made indiegogo price.

[SaperPL]

On 21.03.2017 at 2:08 AM, FAQBytes said:

EDIT: Boy it's been a long time since you originally said $50 for it.

We originally planned it to be a really quick project with small scope - note the fact that we wanted to deliver this on that Christmas

 

Our concept was to get the case body designed around generic cables, prototype it in our local laser cutting shop and gather up ~100 enthusiasts who would buy just the metal bodies from us and proceed with the rest on their own in similar fashion like NFC S4-Mini project is working - you're paying only for case body and all the required components you have to get for yourself except NFC lets you get some of those directly from them.

 

If you look at our design, there are not pieces that cannot be replaced with generic ones:

1) power switch is a standard anti-vandal momentary switch installed in 16mm hole - if you want you can get it in thousand different designs and colours - power button sign, red dot in the middle, warning sign, etc...

2) front panel is based on reference USB dual port baffle instead of some custom PCB based front panel

3) internal pass-through power cord can be made from standard angled IEC C13 power cord and C14 panel connector.

4) the riser slot is made in a way that every generic riser with PCB soldered in parallel to the slot will be supported regardless of the mounting hole positions

5) chassis rubber feet are fairly standard, mounted in 8mm hole

 

This would have been easier for us to handle if we were to ship only metal bodies, but you would have to do:

1) get the switch and solder the motherboard panel cables

2) get the USB baffle yourself

3) get IEC C13 power cable  and solder it yourself

4) get the riser yourself

5) get the rubber feet or plugs yourself

6) paint the case on your own? (we haven't decided at that point whether we were going to paint the cases or not because 100 enthusiasts could paint each case to their own liking)

 

Apart from the fact that you would have to make all that work yourself, you'd have to add the increased cost of retail pricing (over wholesale) for all of those pieces so it would already cost more than our campaign price and you'd have to add shipping costs as well to that. Depending on the shipping you could end up already with something around $200+ and your own time to make this and the quality of each of those details wouldn't be necessarily the same as we give you.

 

In the first few months of project most of the people commenting in our topic on hard forum made us believe that we might not be able to gather this 100 orders for just bare bodies and also we stumbled upon a bending quality problem with the local laser cutting shop and we had to figure out how to proceed with this.

[FAQBytes]

5 hours ago, SaperPL said:

-Snip-

I never expected the project to cost less than $150 per case. In fact I'm glad that you guys are doing everything you're doing, and am happy with the amount of support you all are getting with the cost that comes with not cutting corners.

I'm happy that you guys are also including everything in with the case itself as well. 

I was mostly reminiscing about the beginning of the project and how far everything has come. I had done some prototyping with case designs as well, and even get it up to the point where if I decided to, I could build it in-house with my design. Even with all that, the price came out to $75 a case and I would have extremely limited runs.

The fact you are building it how you are building it at the price you are with all the stuff you include still impresses me.

I wish nothing but success for this, and am sorry if I came across in any other manner.

[SaperPL]

No problem, I understood where you came at, but I wanted to explain the shift in pricing more precisely.

 

It's just not like we launched the project without knowing how much it will cost. Zombi had pretty good idea on how expensive the metal parts would be and it was quite accurate until we figured out that launching the project without all the accessories wouldn't work and because of that we realised we need to improve the quality and functionality of the case body as well. After that the price of the body would slowly but steadily increase as we improved it and required better quality from the subcontractor.

 

My point is, making a $50 project of a simple case body is pretty much doable, but you need know-how on manufacturing process, good design that will have some leeway for bend precision loss and finally a metal machining shop that has staff experienced in precision work on this scale.

[ZombiPL]

4th week of Sentry manufacturing process

 

We are still in the period of receiving packages and organisation of production. We just rented the premises near our office where Sentry will be assembled, packaged and stored before the ride to your homes. We also received some more elements from the lists showed before.

This week we received:
- 2 mm allen wrenches,

 

- USB 3.0 extension cables,

 

- package-foiling machine for printed carton boxes (like we said before, security of your package is very important for us. Packaging Sentry carton box in heat shrink foil will make an additional barrier against eventual moisture during the transport).

 

What is more, we received samples of DEMCiflex magnetic dust filters designed especially for Sentry. You will be able to order them directly from DEMCifilter after we will test those samples to make sure the designs are okay.

 

Meanwhile we talked with our metal parts subcontractor and we predict we will get first transport of steel elements for accessory boxes on the 4th of April. We will get all of those smaller parts at once and on the following week we should start getting Sentry main body parts. Things are getting serious