Case Design
First and foremost is the color palette and finishing I’m looking for with this project. Having an array or reds and golds to pick from has been tricky, I’ve swung back and forth on many occasions when deciding on the right tones of each color. In the end, I didn’t want the red and gold to be too sharp, opting for more subtle tones, something like this:
A darker red with a hint of purple. But the gold was too dark for my liking, and instead I wanted to go with a crisper champagne color.
There will only be room for one case fan within the project, and I wanted it to be as bright as possible with the ability for me to adjust the coloring to suit my mod. This is why I opted for a Corsair HD120 RGB fan.
Even though the PSU in the Elite 110 sticks out about an inch at the back of the case, it still takes up a big chunk of room inside. I did not want to show too much of the PSU, but wanted to have the radiator/fan and reservoir seen, so I have opted to cut an L shape as my window. This will remove all the ventilation grills already on the right hand side of the case covering, and then I’d have to cut the top bit of the L.
I don’t plan on using any window panels just yet as I don’t particularly like how difficult acrylic is to keep clean and how easy it is to scratch it, but I will review this later on in the build.
Layout
There’s really not much room for maneuvering within the Elite 110. When the Bitspower parts arrived, after assembling the pump to the pump mod and reservoir, and with a 90 degree fitting at the top, the entire assembly was just a little bit too tall (around 1.5cm) to fit inside the case. So I had to opt for plan B and have the pump and reservoir mounted separately.
Please excuse my limited drawing skills. This is a very simplified top view of the left hand side of the Elite 110 and in reality everything is a much tighter fit than the picture shows above. With the pump/res combo being too tall for the case, separating the pump and res meant I had to find a suitable location to mount the pump. The best fit I found, and out of sight is above the graphics card (I forgot to draw in the PSU which would cover the top right hand half of the GFX card). I had a ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1050 Ti to play around with for spacing and it was about 1cm too long to even have the res positioned in the picture above. If I was to keep this graphics card, I would need to cut off the extra plastic covering over the heatsink to accommodate the res.
One thing that did surprise me is the amount of spacing that was available above the CPU slot to the bottom of the PSU. With the Bitspower CPU water block and a 90 degree fitting, I still had ample (relatively speaking here) headroom.
But the biggest hurdle will be where and how the hard tube will run. From the bottom of the res a 90 degree fitting will start the tubing to run on the outside of the graphics car, thats between the graphics card and side of frame of the case, which is only the width of a PCI slot. The reason for this is because the outlet of the pump sits slightly lower than the height of the PCB on a normal graphics card, which would mean I would have to route the tubing over the PCB and then under the pump. At this stage, I am still open to the option of different graphics card options:
- Shorter graphics card than the Zotac GTX 1050 Ti so no modding needs to be done to fit in the reservoir.
- Half height graphics card, such as the recent announced MSI GTX 1050 Ti so that tubing can easily routed to the pump.
- Skip using a graphics card entirely and rely on onboard graphics from the motherboard, which would mean so much more room inside the Elite 110.
At this stage of trying to figure out how it is the best way to show off the hard tubing and easy routing, I had to consider in which orientation the slim 120mm Bitspower radiator should be mounted, as there is surprisingly a lot of room for me to do this in all 4 orientations:
- Normal mounting (with inlet and outlet at the bottom) – this provides the easiest orientation for routing the hard tubing, and there is plenty of room above the radiator to sit and hide the RGB controller for the Corsair 120mm RGB fan.
- Upside down – gives more room under the radiator.
- Inlet and outlet towards the left hand side of the case – shows off the hard tubing to its best.
- Inlet and outlet towards the right hand side of the case – outlet too close to the reservoir.
