Rinzler - NZXT Source 530

[Modder]

Hello and welcome to my worklog! Please scroll down and skip this intro if you want to get right to the good stuff.

I will be walking you through my build of the NZXT Source 530 Full Tower chassis. I hope you enjoy this build as much as I have.

Ever since Tron: Legacy released in 2010, I’ve been brainstorming ideas as to what a mod might look like if I were to do one. This is the culmination of that. 3 years of creativity, many hours of planning and a combination of the right people and the right case coming together all at the same time to make something special.

I give you: RINZLER

Before I go any further, I want to take a moment to thank everyone that came together to make this project a reality

• NZXT and ADATA for providing most of the working parts of the build. Visit them at www.nzxt.com and http://www.adata-group.com/index.html, respectively
  
• My good friend Mike at Lutro0 Customs for a huge sponsorship of sleeving materials.
  Check him out at http:www.lutro0-customs.com
• Heath at TEK BY DESIGN for a wonderful assortment of chrome polished socket cap screws. Visit them on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/tekbydesign
• Thomas Harrell from White Light Laser for helping me create the insane laser cut and CNC parts you’re going to feast your eyes on later in this build. Go see the magic he can create at https://www.facebook.com/WhiteLightLaser

There are more people involved in the project, but this is the majority of people that really went above and beyond to make this happen. The project isn’t quite complete, but it’s definitely coming along well enough to get a nice worklog going.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1) You are here.
2) Exploring the case and features
3) Hardware
4) Mocking things up, side panel
5) cutting top panel and front. Preliminary build.
6) Motherboard shroud
7) Power supply cover (Coming soon)
8) Remember the top part I cut out? (Coming soon)
9) Final Assembly (Coming soon)
10) Completion (Coming soon)

 

[Modder]

2) Exploring the case and features

As soon as I unboxed the case, I immediately knew NZXT had been doing their homework. A full tower case that packs many features of a larger, more expensive case with just a little bit bigger footprint than a midtower under $100. Nice.

The case has lots of options. You can throw a bunch of hard drives in it or remove the HDD cages and run a custom high-end watercooling loop. The front panel is very secure and pulls off from the bottom revealing a dust filter.

This piece locks into place via tabs on the side that slide into notches on the front panel. I opted not to use this, as I have other plans.

Once you get past the front panel, You have several options for mounting fans. You can mount 2x120mm, 2x140mm or 1x200mm

2) Exploring the case and features





Nice little side mounted electronics. They are flush mounted so clumsy people like me don’t bang into them with a knee and break them.

Tool-less removal of 5.25 covers.

Walkaround of the chassis.

Just a brief set of pics going around the case. Not getting too detailed here.

 

[Modder]

3) Hardware

Below is all of the hardware used for this build.

Lutro0 Customs goodness! Solar Orange and Charcoal Gray coreless paracord.

MSI Z87-G43 Socket 1150 motherboard + Intel i5 4670K

NZXT Hale82 V2 550W Power Supply

ADATA XPG SX900 256GB SSD

ADATA XPG DDR3-1600 4x4GB

3: hardware

NZXT Aperture M USB 3.0 / card reader

EVGA GTX 760

At this point, I feel it important to note that not everything sent was used. I had planned to use 2 NZXT Kraken X60s in the build: 1 for the CPU and 1 for the GPU, but I had my suspicions of fitting the second one in the front of the case without extensively modifying the upper 5.25 bays. These suspicions were confirmed and I only ended up using one.

There was also an NZXT Sentry LXEthat was briefly used, but since all of the fans I am using aren’t PWM, it made the controller useless so I removed it. A small oversighton my part. For posterity, I will say it’s a very nice controller and I love the look and feel of it. The aluminum unit is very solid and looked great on my desk.

Speaking of fans…

 

[Modder]

4) Mocking things up / side panel

This is where the fun begins! I’ve had a vision in my head of a fully custom PC with edge lit acrylic with UV inlays and things glowing and shining all over the place just like in Tron: Legacy. Orange is my favorite color and the reason I chose to use Rinzler.I’ve seen many blue / white Tron: Legacy builds, but an orange one is hard to find. Let’s begin!

The first thing I did was take the case apart and mock up a PSU cover out of foamboard available at the craft store. This black stuff was about $6 for a large enough sheet to give me plenty to mess around with.

Note the fitment isn’t quite perfect. Needed to trim some to get it to lay right.

I had to notch the backside of the PSU cover to make room for the motherboard tray that angles out slightly. Once I did that, it fit perfectly.

This PSU cover is going to be replaced later in the build log. Wanted to stick some pics in here of what it could potentially look like.

Rough idea of how everything looks, except the Sentry LXE which isn’t being used anymore.

FIRST BOOT! (Notice the fan controller is powered on.

Moving on to the side panel….




I wanted to do something with the side panel to make the most of the angular window and stay within the Tron:Legacy theme.

Here is a candidate for the side panel design. Just kind of getting ideas out there to see what I like.

While we’re at it, playing with the PSU cover as well.

Back to the side panel:

Here’s what we came up with? What do you think?

 

[Modder]

5) Cutting the top and front. Initial build.

This part is very short, sweet and to the point. I am putting a super custom top grill in, so I had to make a cut to get rid of the mesh.

Taped

Cut.

*I noticed my jigsaw cut a little more out of the lower end than I wanted it to, but all is well. Not bad for a freehand cut just following a line drawn with a pencil

Getting down to business on the front panel.

Cleaned up.

Let’s build this thing!

I’m taking you back to first boot. Looks kind of thrown together.

Sleeved some wires and did some cable management.

Installed some fans.

1 fan on rear of HDD cage. This fan is able to be positioned to direct airflow wherever you want it to go. Note the slick looking TEK By Design chrome polished socket cap fan screw.

Here is a shot of the same fan installed in the case and the proximity to the 24 pin sleeved cable coming from the back of the motherboard tray.

Here’s the RBG NZXT logo on the Kraken X60 that you can adjust with the software accompanying it.

Rear fan installed.

Interior

Exterior.

Just cannot get the lighting right to accurately show the colors.

And it works! This is how far we are right now.

Things to do:

• PSU Cover
• Motherboard shroud
• top grill
• something special planned for fans.

 

[Modder]

6) Motherboard shroud

This is where it gets really cool. We are designing the motherboard shroud so that it is clear frosted acrylic. Basically in layman’s terms, we take a clear sheet of acrylic, cut out what we need with the CNC, then stick it on the laser and etch the entire sheet. Looks super cool. Before we could do that though, we needed to know what we were cutting.

What I did was lay the motherboard flat on a non-ESD conductive surface (concrete) and take a picture from around 36” away with a camera on a tripod that had a level sitting on it so we knew it was square. From there, we did a little hocus pocus with scale and used 2 8.5x11 sheets of paper and stapled them together at the reference point. Then, carefully using an X-Acto knife, cut out all the parts we needed to be open. From there, we programmed the CNC to do some wizardry so that it would hollow the acrylic in certain sections when things were too tall just to lay it on, (Capacitors, connectors, etc.)

Here are a few pics of the process.

Pic of motherboard on concrete. Perfectly safe if you’re gentle.

Original black & white raster

First one was too small. Printer failed to properly scale it. (Left). The one on the right is the correct size.

Cutting out the correct size paper draft to make sure it fits.

Here’s a half.

Hocus Pocus

Rough cut.

Pre-frosting

First part finished.

Tonight, we are going to be making the UV orange inlays and figure out how to light the thing with UV cathodes and LED’s. One design point I really am striving for is making the UV stuff react without seeing the purple glow of the cold cathodes. Tomorrow I’m picking up some of those and frosting the tubes by hand with sandpaper.

 

[Outamyhead]

This looks good so far, sub'd