Thought I would show my antec P180, I recently decided I wanted hot swap drives and to bling up my case a little so I ripped the bays from an old server and it began. The first job was to cut out the bottom section from the p180 fan mount area to mount the hot swap bays. The bay itself already had four thumb screws so it was a pretty simple cut the hole and drill four holes for screws affair. Armed with a dremmel it took about half an hour and 5 diamond wheels.
I then painted the whole interior of the case and the drive bays / hot swap bay with gun metal grey spray. Once it was all dry I mounted my Dell 1000w psu (from an xps) and then set about soundproofing the case with neoprene foam. I also added a red LED strip and organised the fans where I wanted them. The hot swap bay is pretty cool, it takes two molex connectors and has its own PCB that has temp sensors for each drive, you set the desired temps via a few dip switches. It also has two three pin fan connectors which then try to maintain the desired drive temps. I have the side facing fan pointing into the drive area and its my intention to cut a meshed aperture in the side panel for this (also adding a window to the left of it)
The only thing that went wrong was nothing to do with the actual case, I managed to break the front door of the front panel (gutted) and its really spoiling the look
So trying to find a p180 front panel at a reasonable price now but its proving difficult.
All the components are now in which are:
Rampage extreme II 1366 MB
i7 920 Running at a stable 3.8ghz
16 gb Corsair Vengeance ram
Asus GTX 560
Corsair H50 Cooler
2 x WD 1tb drives
2 X WD 500GB drives
LG bluray drive
LG DVD Writer
1000W Dell power supply from an XPS 730 (my old case)
I have an SSD on the way, should be here tomorrow and a few more things to do but thought I would post anyway.
I then painted the whole interior of the case and the drive bays / hot swap bay with gun metal grey spray. Once it was all dry I mounted my Dell 1000w psu (from an xps) and then set about soundproofing the case with neoprene foam. I also added a red LED strip and organised the fans where I wanted them. The hot swap bay is pretty cool, it takes two molex connectors and has its own PCB that has temp sensors for each drive, you set the desired temps via a few dip switches. It also has two three pin fan connectors which then try to maintain the desired drive temps. I have the side facing fan pointing into the drive area and its my intention to cut a meshed aperture in the side panel for this (also adding a window to the left of it)
The only thing that went wrong was nothing to do with the actual case, I managed to break the front door of the front panel (gutted) and its really spoiling the look
So trying to find a p180 front panel at a reasonable price now but its proving difficult. All the components are now in which are:
Rampage extreme II 1366 MB
i7 920 Running at a stable 3.8ghz
16 gb Corsair Vengeance ram
Asus GTX 560
Corsair H50 Cooler
2 x WD 1tb drives
2 X WD 500GB drives
LG bluray drive
LG DVD Writer
1000W Dell power supply from an XPS 730 (my old case)
I have an SSD on the way, should be here tomorrow and a few more things to do but thought I would post anyway.