Readers Drives - Fibre is good for you

Posted at: Tuesday 17th February 2009

Sam Hall wanted a case that could hold two full water-cooling loops, but rather than buy a chassis, he built his own from fibreglass.

We added some car body filler where required and then applied two coats of varnish to the plug, which gave it the smooth finish we wanted. This would ensure that the plug broke cleanly from the mould, although this part of the project didn't go according to plan.

Once the mould had set around the plug, we had to use considerable force to pry it free and, in the process, destroyed our carefully constructed plug. Thankfully, the three mould pieces for the base of the chassis and the faceplate were undamaged, which meant that we could finish the case without needing to use the plug again.

My dad helped me to lay the fibreglass into the moulds, and we then bolted the three pieces together so that the fibreglass chassis would emerge from the moulds as a single unit (we used a separate mould for the lid). We then applied a layer of pigmented gel coat to each mould to give the case a clean finish. Sheets of woven glass were then cut to the correct shape and placed into the moulds, with resin to seal them. After two days, it had set thoroughly, so we cracked open the moulds, and I had a neat blue fibreglass box. I marked up all the remaining holes to be cut, including those for the drive bays, side access panels and a window at the top. I used a compressed air-powered disc cutter, which is basically a very powerful Dremel, to do this. An hour or so later, the blue box was starting to resemble a proper computer case.

I removed the metal bracket from a PCI-mounted 4-port USB header that had come with my motherboard and used this as a template to cut out the front USB slots. This was (strangely) the most satisfying part of the build - seeing four tiny USB slots appear on the front of this monster case. The power and reset buttons were then drilled and filed to the correct sizes for the vandal-proof switches I was using. The final step was to attach the motherboard shelf horizontally across the middle of the case, which also acted as a brace to stiffen the chassis and prevent twisting. After blasting the case interior clean with compressed air, it was time to start installing the hardware.

My Athlon system must have sensed my plans for an upgrade and decided to stop working. This gave me a great excuse to buy a new motherboard, CPU and memory. Using the same philosophy as when I decided on a water-cooling kit, I tried to future-proof my new components as best I could, so I opted for an Asus Maximus Formula, with a 2.66GHz Core 2 Quad Q9450 and 2GB of DDR3. I also decided that this would be a good time to try upgrading to Vista, and so far I haven't looked back.

With so much room inside the case, installing the components was easy. Once they were in place, I carefully tested for leakages before booting into Vista for the first time.

I was blown away by how fast it ran. However, I knew the dual water-cooling loops would allow me to coax more speed from the CPU. After carefully testing and tweaking the BIOS, I settled on a modest overclock of 3.2GHz. This meant that the FSB matched the speed of my 1,600MHz OCZ DDR3 memory and provided a generous performance boost. After thoroughly testing the stability of this overclock, I managed to push it even further to 3.4GHz, which is the speed at which I leave it running all the time.