After building my first PC in over decade a few months ago, and watching on as Winston built his Project: Arancio, my modding fingers started to itch. With limited space in Hong Kong, I wanted to something small and compact, and it was with great pleasure I received the Elite 110 from Cooler Master to base my mod on. A mini-ITX case, small and compact, and what better challenge than the limited space I had inside the Elite 110.
Theme
My current PC case is black and is illuminated with purple LEDs and case fans. Project: Arancio is orange and white, and Winston’s upcoming ID-Cooling Stream 2 build will be blue and white (I’m hoping to convince him to put baby pink as the liquid coolant). So that didn’t leave me with much choice in terms of colour. I could have opted for green and/or yellow, but I’ve never been a fan of these colours.
So whilst one day I was window shopping some modelling shops in Hong Kong to get some inspiration, I came across this:
I was captivated by the rich pearlescent red and the contrasting sun beam gold! What a vivid combination….thanks Iron Man! But then there’s several dozens of Iron Man color tones from its different versions. Omitting the non-red/gold combination, there was still a large palette to pick from.
Hardware
This is the tiny case in which I planning to mod and fit all the hardware in; a Cooler Master Elite 110. With the Elite 110 case from Cooler Master, I could only opt for a mini-ITX motherboard.
TBH, I’m still stuck on which mini-ITX motherboard to get, all I have set my mind to is a Skylake Z170 chipset, but there seems to be a lack of mini-ITX motherboards to choose from in Hong Kong. I did mention to Winston that since I’m thinking of watercooling the build, I can go for something that runs a little hotter like an AMD chipset, for which he completely blanked me…….
Given the option of being able to mount a 120mm radiator in the Elite 110, I wasn’t going to pass up on this opportunity! So the CPU will definitely be water cooled, with a small pump and reservoir, all supplied by Bitspower. I could take the easy route here and go for soft tubing, but since I’m all out for this mod, hard PETG tubing is the only way to go! A huge thanks goes out to Bitspower for supplying me with the blood red fittings, and all the necessary watercooling components that I will fit in this tiny mod.
But where will the pump and reservoir go? I love the look of a tubular reservoir, so that’s a certainty. After some quick measurements, I calculated that if I opted for short graphics card like the Zotac GeForce GTX 1050Ti Mini, I will have room to fit the pump and reservoir behind it. Another thanks goes out to Zotac for supplying the graphics card.
The ATX PS2 power supply I am going to use is the Cooler Master V650 which gives me just enough room for the rest of my hardware pieces.
I was kindly supplied with a pair of GEIL Evo X 2x8GB DDR4 3000MHz RAM, but I’m a little skeptical as they are so tall, nearly twice the height of a regular stick of RAM, and in a tiny case, I’m thinking that they will seriously block the flow of my hard tubing. I might need to swap out my G.Skill TridentZ with these.
For the system, a ADATA XPG 240Gb SSD will be slotted in there somewhere….
