Antec Titan - Cutting, Spraying

Hey guys,

A few months ago I cut a hole in the side panel of my Antec Titan, I fitted a perspex sheet there along with a 92mm fan. As the hole itself was cut with an angle grinder it didn't come out the straightest and I always thought it was a little small and still hard to see inside.

I've also scratched the case a bit, it's not normally visible but really comes up on pictures as you'll see here:


and here:


My other reason for wanting to change it is my 2900XT, It keeps revving up on me so I'm going to try and see if I can keep it cooler. My plan is to add a 120mm fan at the bottom of the case and duct it using tights folded over a few times to make them pretty airtight and attach them somehow to the 120mm fan and the intake of the 2900XT. The reason I'm using tights is that they will be flexible enough to move around the other PCI cards below the 2900XT. If that idea doesn't work I'll look into getting proper ducting.

I already have the tights to add as fan filters to the rest of my fans, 1x120mm front, 1x120mm side(new) and 1x120mm back.

At the moment I'm also toying with the idea of creating either an intake or outtake fan at the top of the case but that might completely screw up the airflow through the case.

So here is the current inside of the case:


Here's my plan for the window:


Cont...

And my plan for the duct:


I should have enough room hopefully, the bottom fan won't be affecting other airflow much as it'll be straight in, through the 2900XT and out the back, theoretically

Another reason I had for doing this now was the dust build up in the case, it's been around 4 months now since I've touched it.

This was the front fan, previously modded to fit in the hdd bay:


And a few of the 2900XT heatsink once I took it off:




cont...

All the parts of my 2900XT:


And a nice closeup of the card bared for all to see


Don't worry I cleaned the heatsink before reapplying thermal goop. I had to use the goop that came with my Noctua heatsink though as I ran out of AS5

Hopefully it'll be okay, I did that same on my CPU as it needed a cleanout and temps dropped quite a bit although that could be because it's out in the open now.

This is my PC atm:



So anyway, plans are to cut the holes for the window and bottom fan, cut better holes for cable management behind the motherboard, and then spray the case.

I'm going to be spraying it white on the inside and black on the outside with a nice shiny acrylic coating all round. I'll also be spraying that audigy front panel black but that will require a lot of covering the holes unless I take it apart and do it which I might.

I'm not sure whether I should spray the plastic front of the case, I think I'll see how it matches up with the rest of the case at the end.

Okay finally got around to uploading these pictures, this was last week when I finally got a chance to cut and start spraying the case. I cut out the side panel and I think it looks a bit more interesting now then it did.





As you can see I also cut a hole in the top of the case, that will be the new home for the front panel. You can see the general idea here:



The front panel originally just had a firewire, 2xusb and audio in and out. Seeing as I have a dedicated sound card the audio in and out is useless so I decided to mod it slightly and put the on/off and reset buttons in their place.

This is the original frontpanel:

You can see the two buttons in the picture too. A quick bit of unsoldering and plier work and the two audio jacks were off and a bit of glue later and the buttons are on:



The one problem I can think of with this is that the usb cable isn't quite as long as I'd like, it'll stretch over part of the motherboard like this:



And you can see here a closer look of where it will be going, the fit is almost perfect and i dont think I'll even need to screw the panel cover in place as it's quite tight and needs some wiggling to get it out again. The only bad thing was I ran out of cutting discs with an inch and a half to go so I just bent it back and grinded the angle down until it came off. You can see it in the top right, I'll have to fix that somehow.



I'm going to get rid of the horrible big black plastic front of the case and instead put a simple perspex cover over most of it with holes for the DVD drives and front fan which rests in between the HDD bays.

Here's the front of the case as it is now, you can see the gap where the front panel used to be:



I've got an idea for that which might or might not work out yet. It just so happens that there's a nice gap there that fits the xbox motherboard almost perfectly and leaves the output ports on it going out through the old front panel hole. If i can somehow work out a place for the xbox psu and work out a way of extending the controller and dvd cables then I might go ahead and do that. I might leave it for another time though and just leave the perspex covering the front for now.

Anyway right now I'm waiting for another dry warm day to finish spraying the white base cover. I've gone through 1 and a half cans already. Done another coat since those pictures but it was a bit too cold and condensation formed so chunks of the paint flaked off in parts.

Don't know if I want it white on the outside and black on the inside or vice versa. My gf is egging me for white outside and black inside and I quite like the idea too.

She's going to do me up some TF2 designs on the outside too so watch out for them

Anyway that's it for now, until the next sunny day..

wow. already looks much better then the black/dust of old

love to see it finished

Thanks mate, just about to head out and give it all another spray, maybe start spraying the inside with black.

Got for it Darg! Looking better!

As for the side window, I can highly recommend a good quality Jig Saw and a set of decent sized files (not needle files, slightly larger with a grip) if your arm is steady.

Although moot point, as you've already angle-grinded your way to your new window

Anyways, looking forward to seeing the paint job! I'm hoping to get meself a Rebel 12 and spray that up for ultimate looks

Man I miss my Antec Titan after looking at this thread Looks like an awesome idea though

Okay just a short update guys. Pictures are gonna be up tonight. I've managed to modify the case slightly so that it now has a removable MB tray. That was one thing I was jealous of in other cases but not anymore

All it required was to drill out 4 or 5 rivets, unscrew the top screws (always thought they were rivets) and cut through a small bit of metal that was stopping it from sliding out. Now that I've taken out I can paint the case much easier then before. I've also painted the motherboard tray a nice shade of orange to match the upcoming TF2 orange designs on the outside.

White painting is pretty much done now, black however requires a sanding down of the poorly set areas (condensation of some sort made it all wrinkly) and redoing. I discovered that the local car shop sells paint cheaper then the DIY shop and they seem to be better quality too.

I've got some nice ideas for the front of the case now involving 3 layers of perspex and some nice metal grating over the front 120mm fan

Anyway pictures of current progress to come later.

RoachycaL said:

Man I miss my Antec Titan after looking at this thread Looks like an awesome idea though

Click to expand...

I know. It really is a fantastic case. I've worked in PC7s but they always seem so cramped. What I love about the titan is that it's big enough and plain enough that with the right tools you can pretty much change it into whatever you want.

As I forgot to mention in the above post I am still contemplating fitting the xbox into the case too but that would be more a "look what I can do" rather then anything else. I barely ever use the thing.

wow, stick the xbox in there. would love to see that.

btw, when you drill out the rivets, is there away of putting them back, or can you stick screws in place?

shaffaaf27 said:

wow, stick the xbox in there. would love to see that.

btw, when you drill out the rivets, is there away of putting them back, or can you stick screws in place?

Click to expand...

Going to be sticking screws in their place, won't be perfect but it should hold. To be honest it's a pretty tight fit all round and it uses 5 screws at the top so that should hold it anyway. A few screws at the bottom will hold it in place just fine.

As for the xbox I will wait until the rest is finished, it would require extending atleast the DVD drive cable which uses 8 small cables, a problem with any one would mean it wouldn't work again so I'm a bit iffy about that. Anyway.. i promised pics didn't I. give me a few minutes

EDIT: Okay so here we go, as you can see I have the front panel in place on the top though without the connections. I'm using them atm on my PC

The first image shows the rear panel and the case, the white is finished, just needs its acrylic coat. The black on the case needs to be sanded down and redone in parts.


The case on its own:


The motherboard tray, you can see it comes with two holes already, they're great for getting cables back out from behind the MB tray but getting the cables from the PSU back behind there in the first place is the tricky bit. I quite like how the orange has turned out on this:


Here is the window panel, as you can see the white looks much better then it did after the first coat, this is after about 4 or 5 coats:

And everything put together, the side panels aren't fully in place as they jam a bit with the masking tape on the case and the panels still:


And again:


As you can see the hole for the bottom fan has been cut out. I plan to route this via a doubled (or tripled) over leg of tights with perspex struts to the 2900XT. Hopefully this will feed it more nice cool air and keep it below that magic 70C.

looking good, I like the colour scheme!

There are some good mods going on around here at the moment.

Thats impressive, I like the way you've moved the front pannel controls. Do you have any plans to raise the feet a little? I'd be worried about that bottom intake turning into a bit of a hoover..

I'm looking forward to seeing how this goes!

PK!

Darg said:

I know. It really is a fantastic case. I've worked in PC7s but they always seem so cramped. What I love about the titan is that it's big enough and plain enough that with the right tools you can pretty much change it into whatever you want.

As I forgot to mention in the above post I am still contemplating fitting the xbox into the case too but that would be more a "look what I can do" rather then anything else. I barely ever use the thing.

Click to expand...

I personally wouldn't stick the xbox in there... It looks awesome as it is I want to make my stacker 832 orange and black now! Its already black... wonder what I could shove in there to make it orange

misterPK said:

Thats impressive, I like the way you've moved the front pannel controls. Do you have any plans to raise the feet a little? I'd be worried about that bottom intake turning into a bit of a hoover..

I'm looking forward to seeing how this goes!

PK!

Click to expand...

The case already comes with legs that lift it up about half an inch off the ground so that should give enough clearance for the fan underneath. You can see the legs on the first pic in the thread.

Yea I don't think I will put the xbox in, if for no other reason then I barely ever use it. Now if I had a 360 to play with

@Roachy:
If you can remove the motherboard tray I'd recommend you spray that, it's easy enough to spray something that small and it adds that little bit of colour that makes all the difference


Now that I have the side panel pretty much finished it's time to get down to the TF2 designs. This will be mainly my gfs work, she's thinking along the lines of a print design, i.e. the outline is done in orange then she does a cut out for black areas and white areas on them to make the different people stand out.

The image I'm going for is this one:


Though I have found that the image at the end of the TF2 original meet the character trailers is better but I can't find that in image form. Here is it from the end of the trailer. If anyone can find it in a higher res I'll bake you a brownie:

Okay just to update you guys. Yesterday I tried the ducting idea of quadrupled over tights from the bottom fan to the graphics card. Upon connecting the duct to the fan and testing it I realised something. Tights are porous, even when they are quadrupled over. So now I need better ducting material. I'm trying to think of where I can get something that would work. It needs to bend around the PCI cards a bit so I need something flexible but airtight.

I'm still looking for a bigger resolution version of this image:


I was walking past an internet cafe the other day and they had a big poster of it so I know it must be around somewhere. I'm at the stage where I'll probably just email a contact I have in valve and ask him if he can do me a favour

If any of you can find a bigger version of it though I'll send you a sexy kissogram.