Silverstone FT02/FT05 inspired, Apple Mac looking mATX tower

Enclosures and acoustic damping to help quiet them.

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Jon-R
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Silverstone FT02/FT05 inspired, Apple Mac looking mATX tower

Post by Jon-R » Thu Jan 16, 2014 4:47 am

Hi!

This is my first post after many years of lurking. I've been doodling case designs for quite a while now, and yesterd after I saw the new Silverstone FT05, I finally felt inspired enough to do a composite of my fantasy design in Photoshop, and then share it with the lovely people here who might appreciate it:
DataSkiss.jpg
Both the unrestricted airflow of the FT02/FT05 and the understated aluminium design of recent Apple Macs, specifically the Mac Mini, were used as a base for this design. The exterior is a composite where I stretched out the Mac Mini to the desired dimension, and then added the old Mac Pros ventilation holes. The interior is a composite of the FT05 interior, to which I added HDD racks from the Bitfenix Prodigy on top. The doors on both sides cover the entirety of the case, meaning that the air-holes are a part of the doors, but due to my lacking Photoshop skillz I simplified the composite image a bit.

The interior of the case is divided in to two chambers. The lower chamber houses the m-ATX motherboard, fed by two 140mm fans up front, as well as the PSU which draws air in from the bottom and exhausts out back. Depending on PSU length, there is also a 2x3.5" HDD cage in front of the PSU, as in the FT05. There is a 120mm exhaust at the back to help get rid of hot air, and a slim ODD top left. The upper chamber houses 4x3.5" HDDs as well as 3(?)x2.5" HDDs, and has 2x80mm fans up front feeding fresh air and 2x80mm at the back exhausting it. All three fans would have dust-filters in front of them, either through a 2x140mm and a 2x80mm one, or a single large one.

Critique is more than welcome, but please forgive dimensional errors as well as Photoshop errors, as I made the design by eye without measuring anything exactly, and the composite is cobbled together from bits and pieces around the net. The idea is that the case is a bit wider than seen here, because as you can see the long GPU is blocking the front fans, but as I'm using the FT05 interior I had to go with its dimensions.
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thegrommit
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Re: Silverstone FT02/FT05 inspired, Apple Mac looking mATX t

Post by thegrommit » Fri Jan 17, 2014 1:58 pm

Not sure why you'd need quite so many drive bays, but a nice idea.

Anyhow, while it's not mATX, the Rosewill MX2 is aesthetically close if you're looking for a case along those lines:

http://techreport.com/news/25924/latest ... minum-clad

The Legacy U3 is mATX if you could deal without the optical drive.

Jon-R
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Re: Silverstone FT02/FT05 inspired, Apple Mac looking mATX t

Post by Jon-R » Fri Jan 17, 2014 2:35 pm

thegrommit wrote:Not sure why you'd need quite so many drive bays, but a nice idea.

Anyhow, while it's not mATX, the Rosewill MX2 is aesthetically close if you're looking for a case along those lines:

http://techreport.com/news/25924/latest ... minum-clad

The Legacy U3 is mATX if you could deal without the optical drive.
I want the 3.5" slots for RAID-5/6 for HDDs and the 2.5" slots for RAID-2 for SSDs.

Yeah, I've looked in to those two, available here as the Cooltek U3 and UMX2. They're really close to what I want, I'm just not convinced about the airflow, and I'd really want 4 3.5" slots.

Mrc112
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Re: Silverstone FT02/FT05 inspired, Apple Mac looking mATX t

Post by Mrc112 » Fri Jan 17, 2014 2:56 pm

That Mx2 is sexyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy:shock:

Also seems to have quite a bit of potential, would love to see SPCR do a review about this case !

Mats
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Re: Silverstone FT02/FT05 inspired, Apple Mac looking mATX t

Post by Mats » Fri Jan 17, 2014 2:59 pm

Double post.
Last edited by Mats on Fri Jan 17, 2014 3:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Mats
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Re: Silverstone FT02/FT05 inspired, Apple Mac looking mATX t

Post by Mats » Fri Jan 17, 2014 3:01 pm

It looks nice, but I think you need much more air intakes for those components, at least if you want it to be reasonably quiet.

Jon-R
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Re: Silverstone FT02/FT05 inspired, Apple Mac looking mATX t

Post by Jon-R » Fri Jan 17, 2014 3:12 pm

Mats wrote:It looks nice, but I think you need much more air intakes for those components, at least if you want it to be reasonably quiet.
Another design has the whole front perforated like the old Mac Pro, but I really wanted a clear front. I didn't really know how big the vents should be without testing, so I just went with what looks nice. I'm not sure how big vents slow fans require. Doesn't smaller vents also block more noise? Is there a tower case that uses vents along both sided at the front that I could use as a reference?

Mats
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Re: Silverstone FT02/FT05 inspired, Apple Mac looking mATX t

Post by Mats » Fri Jan 17, 2014 7:21 pm

Jon-R wrote:Doesn't smaller vents also block more noise?
AFAIK, smaller vents block the airflow much more than they block noise.
Just look at basically any case that's considered quiet, there's usually more vents provided than needed.

Jon-R
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Re: Silverstone FT02/FT05 inspired, Apple Mac looking mATX t

Post by Jon-R » Sat Jan 18, 2014 1:35 am

Mats wrote:
Jon-R wrote:Doesn't smaller vents also block more noise?
AFAIK, smaller vents block the airflow much more than they block noise.
Just look at basically any case that's considered quiet, there's usually more vents provided than needed.
My reasoning was that something like the Antec P182 doesn't have much bigger vents, yet it has only one fan, and has a much more cluttered path for the air to reach the components.

Mats
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Re: Silverstone FT02/FT05 inspired, Apple Mac looking mATX t

Post by Mats » Sat Jan 18, 2014 9:25 am

You mean the the rectangular holes in the door? It may not look like a big difference in terms of cooling performance, but it is.
Image
For the same reason, no decent case maker uses the old school fan vents anymore. You need fast spinning fans for that, it's just inefficient.
Image
However, if you don't intend to run two graphics cards it may work.

Jon-R
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Re: Silverstone FT02/FT05 inspired, Apple Mac looking mATX t

Post by Jon-R » Sun Jan 19, 2014 5:33 am

Mats wrote:You mean the the rectangular holes in the door? It may not look like a big difference in terms of cooling performance, but it is.

For the same reason, no decent case maker uses the old school fan vents anymore. You need fast spinning fans for that, it's just inefficient.

However, if you don't intend to run two graphics cards it may work.
I hear you. I had a Antec P182 that was decent enough even though it only had a single 12cm Noctua as intake. Which is why I imagined that two 140cm fans would be at least at good if they were right next to the components, even with the smaller intake. But adding another row or two of holes wouldn't really harm the aesthetics, so you might as well.

thegrommit
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Re: Silverstone FT02/FT05 inspired, Apple Mac looking mATX t

Post by thegrommit » Sun Jan 19, 2014 8:40 am

Mrc112 wrote:That Mx2 is sexyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy:shock:

Also seems to have quite a bit of potential, would love to see SPCR do a review about this case !
It appears the original is a Jonsbo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxs-VJQah9s

Lots of vents on the bottom, but raised so it's easier to remove the filter. The $200 price tag probably precludes a review unless newegg/rosewill donate one.

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