Neptune's Trident by Brian Carter

Front Panel and Reservoirs

At the front of the case, I removed the right side post where the wrap-around window would ultimately go, and made the original Lian Li logo badge area and IO ports disappear, in favor of a new Trident shaped design element. This area went through myriad design changes before I settled on a subtle and fitting solution.

Still, I felt I was getting too far out and had to reel myself back in, and remind myself what the main focus of the case was - the T3 reservoirs. So I fabricated a Trident shape out of left-over aluminum panel, and made that the new home for the IO ports.

To give it some dimension, I curved the bottom under the case and set it off the front by 0.5in, then added a blue acrylic counterpart behind it. The T3 is a dual-bay reservoir, so I needed a case that had at least six external 5 1/4in drive bays. Fortunately, the Lian Li V2000 has seven.



I devised my own mounting posts out of clear acrylic and spaced the reservoirs evenly between the front opening, leaving just enough room for a slimline optical drive. Since I had removed every last drive cage from the case, I now had to devise a new method of mounting the three Samsung 1TB hard drives.





After measuring out the upper section of the case, I found there was enough room between the reservoirs and motherboard to stack the drives vertically on their sides. This would tuck them neatly away without interfering with the liquid cooling.