Hi Guys
I have done some downsizing recently. Decided to stick my system on air cooling for a while as I need a bit of space. I have recently been put in charge of all of the cooling and modding groups at OcUK, I thought that this would be an excellent opportunity to review some of the hardware I am looking buying.
My biggest bug bear is putting my GTX 590 on air. It has never been ran on air ever so the prospect of taking the blocks off and dealing with a noisy GPU again is a bit of a tough pill to swallow.
The pictures show a 680 but this is just for reference as my 590 still has its watercooling blocks on it.
Full specification for the system is fairly simple:
only two mods for the system:
SSD Dual Mount mod, this involves two Silverstone SSD mounts layered on top of each other using TJ07 stand-offs
cable braiding on the front panel cables
The case looks superb, the colour is really smart and matches the stand of my Dell monitor well. I was really surprised by the build quality of the FT03. All of the panels are really thick and well made, it has such a solid build quality and is by far one of the nicest cases I have used.
Here is a small modification, the FT03 only allows for one SSD to be mounted using the supplied holes. I decided I wanted to keep my drives together and came up with using the longer TJ07 stand-offs to screw in the first SSD and some nice allen head bolts to screw in the second drive. The plastic on the second ssd was fouling the side panel. this meant that I had to cut the tabs off the sides and use the holes on the bottom of the drive to mount it. Admittedly, this was a bit of a bodge job and needs sanding down to make it perfect. You can see it is a bit rough in the picture.
Cable management in this case is easy, there is acres of room behind the motherboard tray. The only problem I encountered was that I wanted to use my Bitfenix black braided extensions for my main power cables. This was impossible because adding the braided extensions made the cable management a nightmare. It was simply too long in such a small case. I used some P Clips I had from a hardware shop to hold most of the cable routing in place. looked much better than cable ties and the screw holes for the hard drives that weren't in use were a perfect mounting point for them
The rear panel is a fairly standard affair. I swapped the chrome 120mm grill out for a black one and exchanged the Silverstone stock fan for a 900RPM Noiseblocker BlackSilent Pro PL1 fan. This is a superb case fan and one of our best sellers. Whisper quiet with unique mounting hardware. I was mega impressed with the way the fan looks and performs. both Noiseblocker fans I used came with modular cables so I could choose either a short or a long fan cable depending on my case layout. Noiseblocker are a brand exclusive to OcUK in the UK too.
Matching the rear fan, I went for the more powerful Noiseblocker BlackSilent Pro PLPS PWM fan. This is a PMW fan which spins up to 1500RPM and has incredible performance statistics. I would say that this is easily one of the best fans for a CPU cooler on the market at the moment. It looks superb and performs well. I used the Limited Edition Black Megahalems from Prolimatech to cool the CPU. This cooler is perfect for 2011 and looks brilliant with the 'BlackSilent' range of Noiseblocker fans. This setup ensures that my cpu cooler doesn't foul whatever memory modules I go for.
The overall build looks great in the flesh and is very quiet thanks to the cooling configuration. I fully expect it to get much louder when an aircooled GTX 590 is in there. [The GTX 680 is just a test sample we had at OcUK to test the system with]. Overall I am really happy with the build and the components I have used have really surprised me in terms of quality.
Big thanks to Phil for taking the photographs of the completed system.
I have done some downsizing recently. Decided to stick my system on air cooling for a while as I need a bit of space. I have recently been put in charge of all of the cooling and modding groups at OcUK, I thought that this would be an excellent opportunity to review some of the hardware I am looking buying.
My biggest bug bear is putting my GTX 590 on air. It has never been ran on air ever so the prospect of taking the blocks off and dealing with a noisy GPU again is a bit of a tough pill to swallow.
The pictures show a 680 but this is just for reference as my 590 still has its watercooling blocks on it.
Full specification for the system is fairly simple:
- Silverstone Fortress FT03 Tower Case - Titanium
- MSI X79MA-GD45 Motherboard
- Intel Core i7-3820
- Gigabyte GeForce GTX 590 Graphics Card [not pictured]
- Crucial Ballistix Elite 8GB (soon to be replaced)
- Corsair AX750w PSU
- Samsung 256GB SSD 830
- Crucial RealSSD M4 128GB
- Samsung 1TB HDD [not pictured]
- Asus Xonar D2X 7.1 PCI-E Sound Card
- Prolimatech Black Megahalems CPU Cooler
- Noiseblocker BlackSilent Pro Fan PL1 Fan
- Noiseblocker BlackSilent Pro Fan PLPS
- Gelid Extreme Thermal Paste
only two mods for the system:
SSD Dual Mount mod, this involves two Silverstone SSD mounts layered on top of each other using TJ07 stand-offs
cable braiding on the front panel cables
The case looks superb, the colour is really smart and matches the stand of my Dell monitor well. I was really surprised by the build quality of the FT03. All of the panels are really thick and well made, it has such a solid build quality and is by far one of the nicest cases I have used.
Here is a small modification, the FT03 only allows for one SSD to be mounted using the supplied holes. I decided I wanted to keep my drives together and came up with using the longer TJ07 stand-offs to screw in the first SSD and some nice allen head bolts to screw in the second drive. The plastic on the second ssd was fouling the side panel. this meant that I had to cut the tabs off the sides and use the holes on the bottom of the drive to mount it. Admittedly, this was a bit of a bodge job and needs sanding down to make it perfect. You can see it is a bit rough in the picture.
Cable management in this case is easy, there is acres of room behind the motherboard tray. The only problem I encountered was that I wanted to use my Bitfenix black braided extensions for my main power cables. This was impossible because adding the braided extensions made the cable management a nightmare. It was simply too long in such a small case. I used some P Clips I had from a hardware shop to hold most of the cable routing in place. looked much better than cable ties and the screw holes for the hard drives that weren't in use were a perfect mounting point for them
The rear panel is a fairly standard affair. I swapped the chrome 120mm grill out for a black one and exchanged the Silverstone stock fan for a 900RPM Noiseblocker BlackSilent Pro PL1 fan. This is a superb case fan and one of our best sellers. Whisper quiet with unique mounting hardware. I was mega impressed with the way the fan looks and performs. both Noiseblocker fans I used came with modular cables so I could choose either a short or a long fan cable depending on my case layout. Noiseblocker are a brand exclusive to OcUK in the UK too.
Matching the rear fan, I went for the more powerful Noiseblocker BlackSilent Pro PLPS PWM fan. This is a PMW fan which spins up to 1500RPM and has incredible performance statistics. I would say that this is easily one of the best fans for a CPU cooler on the market at the moment. It looks superb and performs well. I used the Limited Edition Black Megahalems from Prolimatech to cool the CPU. This cooler is perfect for 2011 and looks brilliant with the 'BlackSilent' range of Noiseblocker fans. This setup ensures that my cpu cooler doesn't foul whatever memory modules I go for.
The overall build looks great in the flesh and is very quiet thanks to the cooling configuration. I fully expect it to get much louder when an aircooled GTX 590 is in there. [The GTX 680 is just a test sample we had at OcUK to test the system with]. Overall I am really happy with the build and the components I have used have really surprised me in terms of quality.
Big thanks to Phil for taking the photographs of the completed system.
