The graphics card arrives!
By this time, Zotac was kind enough to replace the GTX 1050 Ti which I was using to measure up with a GTX 1050 Ti Mini, which is slightly shorter, giving me ample room to slide in the reservoir behind the graphics card. Being a double PCI slot card (the cooler and fans make up the thickness), I was still a little wary on if I had enough room behind the graphics card to route my hard tubing. I had already started planning for the worst by measuring up which parts of the left hand brackets of the case I needed to cut and remove to fit in the tubing!
I bought a length of 16/12cm PETG tubing from SSP to measure up, and to my surprises there’s actually plenty of room (relatively speaking)!
Now that one of the tougher routes for the tubing has been set, my thoughts turned to the look of the Zotac GTX 1050 Ti Mini. With the orientation of how a mini ITX motherboard is mounted in the Elite 110, you only get to see the back (or PCB) of the graphics card from the right hand side where it will be windowed.
There is no way in hell I’m going to paint the back of the PCB on the graphics card, so I had to look for other ways. I could DIY it and make a back cover with whatever material I can find that is suitable, and then paint it, but then I stumbled upon this:
This is a backplate for the GTX 780 from EKWB. Its the same height as my graphics card (111.5mm) but obviously too long, but a quick few minutes with the cutting tool should sort it out, but unfortunately I deem having to spend HK$300 on a backplate which I will need to cut up a tad expensive. So I will have to DIY it!
So I hunted around and found a piece of off-cut dark red acrylic for just HK$8!
So a quick measurement of the back of the Zotac GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Mini was done. Length = 14.5cm and height = 9.8 cm.
There’s still plenty of room on the sheet of acrylic, I can make another backplate if I needed to.
As you can see there is a little tone difference between the acrylic and the paint I will be using, but I’m hoping the little contrast works in my favour.
