My new Shinobi XL!

[Muel]

My Shinobi XL arrived today! I am very very happy with it, never done a build log for a desktop before.

Here's my old case, an Antec 300, heavily modified with the HDD bays removed, an old PSU gutted and use to store cables in, lots of cable routing holes, a Lian Li hard drive caddy + fan mount thingy, and far too much hardware really. It was getting way too hot I was tired of the styling:

So in came the Shinobi XL.

Here they are together, small difference in volume!

Started by stripping the case down to the bare chassis.

The small pile of stuff I removed from the case that won't be going back in.

That's as far as I got really. Built my rig into it for the weekend but not made any mods to it, so nothing really to show...

 

[Muel]

Cheers, it is lovely!

Playing around with the front, it's going to look roughly like this:

Just need to order the Lian Li bezels so the mesh all matches up properly.

My plan for it is to keep the basic chassis white, but all the cables, fans, mesh etc will be black. I'm really liking the black/white contrast!

 

[Muel]

I can't, it's part of the mesh bit. Similar to this:

Considering removing the front mesh strips and painting the slot they fit in black, I'm not keen on the white showing through, what do we think?

 

[Muel]

It "fits" without any issues yes, but it's not completely flush, it sticks out by about 1mm, could easily be sorted by some gentle sanding/filing of the front panel though, just needed the shoulder taking off that DVD drives slide up to. If you can be bothered that is! (I'd recommend it as then the panel will lift off over the Lian Li stuff, but I haven't got round to it yet).

I'm getting some mesh bezels too, I used the ones from my Antec 300 to do the mockup shot above.

 

[Muel]

No worries dude.

Struggling to decide about my front panel! What do you guys think:

http://i273.photobucket.com/albums/jj207/ElMuelio/Shinobi XL/2012-07-01151846.jpg

Or

http://i273.photobucket.com/albums/jj207/ElMuelio/Shinobi XL/2012-06-29174003.jpg

I'm starting to like the idea of getting the Lian Li bezels to match the caddy I already have, then spraying them white...

 

[Muel]

First stage in the built is done at last! Still waiting on my new cooler but should arrive soon.

Anyway, pics.

Proud of this. Bought a Bitfenix extender and shortened it so it fed power to my two HDDs and my SSD without having loops of ugly cabling everywhere.

Apart from a new cooler and maybe a few small mods, it'll be staying mostly like this for a good while now. At some point though I want to change the graphics cards for a single one, and the motherboard, CPU and Ram for good ones, so will decide on a proper colour scheme next time... The blue/red clash doesn't really do it for me...

 

[Muel]

Cheers guys, still not finished because I'm waiting on my new CPU cooler.

There's a couple more things I want to do, like track down some black mesh for the top. The original prototype pics were black, this one is white. I was not happy.

I didn't even trying building it without the HDD cages, I've never liked them, always end up removing them and mounting the HDDs in the optical bays somehow. Just wish this Lian Li caddy would let me reverse mount them! They slipped up there when designing it IMO.

 

[Muel]

Plans are set, going to spray it black this weekend. Going to just shotblast the white paint off and spray the black straight on, can't be bothered messing with primer. Be finneee.

 

[Muel]

Got itchy fingers! I was all set to take it to my Dad's work and shotblast the original paint off and spray it properly. Then I decided to spray it anyway to get a test spray done. Then I finished it. Personally I think it's a big improvement. Better than the mis-matched white it was before!

Old:

New:

 

[Muel]

Had a couple of spare Lian Li bezels, so decided to play with one. Considering having just these in the 5.25" bays sprayed white instead of the current black ones, which would also do away with the one with the logo. Opinions?

 

[Muel]

How is this going?

Saw your link in sig and I was thinking about getting one of these cases! Looks great!

Tis finished, hasn't changed since this post apart from I changed the CPU cooler. Looks the same on the outside though. Tried out the white bezel but didn't like it, so it's staying all black on the front.

Good idea with the front. What fans did you put there?

Changed the rear exhaust for a 140mm spectre, then put the 120mm in the front as an intake above the 230mm. Left both 230mm fans in there stock positions, but mounted them on rubber mounts and braided the cables.

 

[Muel]

Got here from the link in your sig, what are the specs of that beast..? You said 'old tech' but it doesn't look all that old to me

Well it's old to me, I built the original one 3 years ago now. It's a 965BE, Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H, 8gb of boring RAM and 5830 Crossfire. The only new technology is the Crucial M4 SSD, which isn't exactly cutting edge any more really.

The thought of a white case didn't appeal to me at all,.....until I saw those pics.

Very nice.

Glad it appeals to someone, I'm not really "feeling" it any more. Normally with a long-term project build (whether it's a bike, computer etc), I tend to bond with it but I just haven't with this. It's got too many flaws that I'm just not happy about. I may fix them though one day.

 

[Muel]

Appauling. It's worse than the reviews. Even with the vented bezels it's terrible. When you remove the front panel it sounds like the fan runs at least 25% faster, so I run it at the full 12v.

I may modify it in the future to sort out the issues, we'll see.


EDIT: Sorry, that's not fair. The cooling is actually quite good, but the air-flow through the front of the case is appauling. It does need more air flow really, but there's not much more I can do without modding it heavily.

 

[Muel]

Well the front panel is 95% (probably more) solid after all so it was never going to win any awards for airflow through the front

The airflow could have been massively improved if they'd made the front panel 10-15mm thicker though. It's the fact that the surface area of the fan compared to the surface area available for air to be drawn in through is so small that is the issue IMO.

Anyway, one day if my ideas become plans, there will no longer be an issue with airflow...

 

[Muel]

I guess this is also a problem with the normal Shinobi too... I'm still going to get it though, just love the look!

I guess you could mod the front panel so have some sort of mesh on the front, like most other cases. Or even just neatly drill holes so you still have the same BitFenix soft touch look over the front... it's just holey

Anyway, looks good mate. Nice work


Cam.

I've seen that mod done already, ruins the look though IMO.

This looks awesome.

Cheers.