I've owned an original, gen 1, In Win DFrame for a number of years now. This chassis was never designed to allow for the incorporation of a custom water cooling system:
1. The three fan brackets, which run along the bottom of the chassis, are awkwardly spaced, and thus, prevent a proper mounting of a radiator. This design also prevents fans from being placed under the radiator in a functional orientation (`2" gap in between) and with a top mounted layout, space becomes an issue.
2. The brackets are also supported by extremely short screws, penetrating the motherboard tray about 3/16" which can cause problems in regards to weight capacity. Ultimately, running a bottom rad, with 3 fans and potentially mounting a reservoir, proved to be too great a risk for me to take...
3. The motherboard tray design doesn't allow for the mounting of a reservoir, nor does the top fan bracket. It was, again, too risky to use the fan bracket as a mounting platform, especially for something as important as a reservoir. The motherboard tray has, imo, the most arbitrary screw hole layout, of any system I've ever worked on. In fact, while I took dozens of measurements, there came a point where I couldn't tell whether In Win designed the case using imperial or metric systems. When I show a picture of one ot the templates for the mounting system I designed, you'll see what I'm referring to in more detail.
These are the primary issues I had to overcome in modifying the DFrame in order to accommodate a custom cooling solution. There are also less obtrusive issues which I'll cover as we go through this build log, as is the case with any custom build, tbh.
1. The three fan brackets, which run along the bottom of the chassis, are awkwardly spaced, and thus, prevent a proper mounting of a radiator. This design also prevents fans from being placed under the radiator in a functional orientation (`2" gap in between) and with a top mounted layout, space becomes an issue.
2. The brackets are also supported by extremely short screws, penetrating the motherboard tray about 3/16" which can cause problems in regards to weight capacity. Ultimately, running a bottom rad, with 3 fans and potentially mounting a reservoir, proved to be too great a risk for me to take...
3. The motherboard tray design doesn't allow for the mounting of a reservoir, nor does the top fan bracket. It was, again, too risky to use the fan bracket as a mounting platform, especially for something as important as a reservoir. The motherboard tray has, imo, the most arbitrary screw hole layout, of any system I've ever worked on. In fact, while I took dozens of measurements, there came a point where I couldn't tell whether In Win designed the case using imperial or metric systems. When I show a picture of one ot the templates for the mounting system I designed, you'll see what I'm referring to in more detail.
These are the primary issues I had to overcome in modifying the DFrame in order to accommodate a custom cooling solution. There are also less obtrusive issues which I'll cover as we go through this build log, as is the case with any custom build, tbh.
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