Mod of the Month - November 2008

SpeLL7

by blackflag
Worklog

At the opposite end of the scale to an SFF mod there is, of course, the cube mod which was first popularised with the iconic Yeong Yang "Borg" Cube. blackflag has chosen Lian Li's PC-343B chassis as the starting point for his latest project, SpeLL7.

He explained that the reason why he's opted for this case is because he found that another Lian Li chassis, the V2000, became "a little tight" with all of his watercooling gear and nine hard drives.

blackflag was quick to get to work and before he even managed to grab some pictures of the PC-343B in its out of the box form, he'd already stripped the case down.


A lot of the gear used in his previous case will be moved over to the PC-343B once it's finished, including his power supply, memory, processor, the aforementioned nine hard drives (that's eight 500GB and a 250GB for those interested), along with his Black Ice GTX 360 radiator and some fans.

blackflag ordered a couple of sheets of aluminium, some hollow aluminium tubing for cable management and some aluminium rods to support the motherboard tray as he plans to rotate the motherboard by 90 degrees so that it's horizontal. He says the reason for this is that it will allow him to better fit the components inside the chassis. One of the sheets of aluminium will be used for the back panel on the case, where blackflag is planning to mount the Black Ice GTX 360 rad along with a couple of 120mm fans at the bottom to keep the hard drive compartment cool.


After mocking up the fan grills on the piece of aluminium that will be turned into the back panel, blackflag then set about marking out where the various pieces would go on it. He's not only got to account for the fans, but he's also got the rear IO ports, PCI expansion brackets and power supply to cater for as well.

blackflag warned almost right at the start of his worklog that some of his updates would be a little sporadic and he hinted that he was going to be using an etched window with HR Giger's spell on it from a previous mod. One such update was him fitting this to the roof of his chassis - it should look absolutely stunning when it's lit up because the level of detail is second to none.


Attention to detail is a big factor in blackflag's mod and that's one thing that has certainly given me a lot of inspiration. Seemingly little things like the cable sleeving set this build apart from many of the others we've seen recently - instead of just sleeving the PSU cables, blackflag has sleeved each cable individually. I can only begin to imagine how long that would take to do.


A classic example of this is is the cable sleeving for the SpeLL7's hard drive array - not only has blackflag used 90 degree SATA connectors and, combined with the super-human cabling job, you've got some incredibly neat cables for the hard drive array. It seems fairly certain that there'll be no cable spaghetti in SpeLL7 and I for one can't wait to see how this mod progresses!

There are many more great little touches in SpeLL7 already and you can find them in blackflag's worklog. While you're on your way to the forums, please stop off and vote for blackflag if you think SpeLL7 has what it takes to be November's Mod of the Month.