Chimera Industries Cerberus: The 18L, mATX, USA-made enclosure
- Thread starter PlayfulPhoenix
- Start date
Luke DID look at the case, and he DID say that it was pretty awesome and that he hoped that it would succeed, but he's skeptical that it would at this point in time.
A lot of people are. During the crowdfunding goldrush, so many people have been burned by projects that were awesome and cool but never got to the state that was advertised. In general, buying something before it's done is a very dangerous concept for consumers. I could talk hours about this, but the baseline is that you really have to gain peoples trust in order to convince them to pay upfront on a crowdfunding platform.
Some campaigns are now extremely transparent about every detail, shipping partners and timeline, production costs and so on, in order to make the backers feel like they're investing in something that's pretty much out the door, just missing a bit of money instead of a pipe-dream or a cheap product that is overpriced. I couldn't find any information like that on your campaign, but I don't think like anyone asked for it, either.
5 days left, not even a third of the way there yet. It looks like this campaign is indeed going to fail.
@Aiboh
One correction:
And one question:
And you most likely will not make changes to cater "feature requests" at this point but I might as well ask in case you choose to alter vent patterns to reduce the cost in case of the current KS campaign not reaching the goal: will you be able to extend just (or at least) the left-most column of the vertically running front vents to span at least 264.5mm (center-to-center distance of course) , preferably 270mm, instead of 245.5mm long as it currently is, so that two 140mm fans are mountable on the front with at least three of the four corners of the top 140mm fan are screwed to the front frame? Yes I'm aware the top-right corner of the top 140mm fan would cover about half of the cable routing hole up there, and also that this extension would also screw up the top edge of the Inf Vents section and aesthetically not pleasing.
One correction:
Length of the Infinite Vents on the side bracket should be about 10mm longer than what's indicated in this figure, otherwise the case would be 10mm shorter in depth than the current official spec.
Dimensions are to the inside of the frame
And one question:
What is the purpose of the four horizontal slits at the top of the front Infinite Vents? Just for the aesthetics?
Dimensions are to the inside of the middle frame section, there is another 1mm on top/bottom/left side if the rad is offset from the front by a fan.
And you most likely will not make changes to cater "feature requests" at this point but I might as well ask in case you choose to alter vent patterns to reduce the cost in case of the current KS campaign not reaching the goal: will you be able to extend just (or at least) the left-most column of the vertically running front vents to span at least 264.5mm (center-to-center distance of course) , preferably 270mm, instead of 245.5mm long as it currently is, so that two 140mm fans are mountable on the front with at least three of the four corners of the top 140mm fan are screwed to the front frame? Yes I'm aware the top-right corner of the top 140mm fan would cover about half of the cable routing hole up there, and also that this extension would also screw up the top edge of the Inf Vents section and aesthetically not pleasing.
Which is frustrating because it's not really the fault of Kickstarter or the other crowdfunding platforms, it's some people aren't careful with what projects they back. I've backed 83 projects on Kickstarter over the last 4 years and they have all either delivered or are still in progress except for one, which did fail to deliver due to exhausting their funds before they had a worthwhile project to show for it.
Good catch, I've corrected it.
The vent pattern didn't quite extend high enough for the PSU intake.
I was considering that already. Both 140mm fans would only have 3/4 screws though because the top-right and bottom-right corners aren't actually usable for 140mm fans due to the tabs on the front panel getting in the way of the screws.
Thanks Aiboh.
Ah I see.
Could you clarify what "tabs" you are talking about? Do you mean the portion of the SFX PSU bracket that's bent on the front side?
/snip
5 days left, not even a third of the way there yet. It looks like this campaign is indeed going to fail.
I do not want to sound pessimistic but for me it was obvious after the first week had passed...
There is one thought that keeps itching my mind though: Why wasn't the case just 25mm or so taller for obvious benefits of a bottom radiator with bottom card and/or a 280mm rad in the front. Basically enabling much beefier custom loops, hence amplifying that multi-GPU proficiency while still beeing (barely) under 20L, thus expanding the target audience...? (and I know that the Project Nova started at around 17L. I just can not understand what was gained without those 1.5-1.7L, and in height only therefore keeping the footprint )
Thanks and now that I look at your last sketchup file with the front panel on, I see those two tabs on the right side slightly overlapping the right-most column line. Yes I recall seeing a photo you took with a 140mm Phanteks fan and the head of the flathead screws slightly protruding. The two tabs on the left side seem fine so as you said 3 of the 4 screws will be fine and I believe that's enough to hold the fans in place, not the best practice, I know. If extending the left-most column vents is not a viable option I guess that's fine. (I will probably drill a hole.)
The Nova-00 prototype was 17L, the project actually started at 14.6L.
The problem is there is always some setup that would benefit from a bit more space, as a designer I just had to draw the line at some point. I know there are some people following the project who consider even the 17L of Nova a bit too large.
Yeah.. I guess you can't have your cake and eat it.
For the same reason I think that those people should consider mITX (particularly the "enthusiast" crowd).
I also still think that dual 280mm (or if not that dual 240mm; 240mm + 280mm) under 20L (unlike the Jeffinslav's 21-ish) rolls off the tongue nicely, especially in marketing materials. On top of that volumetric efficiency could perhaps be a hair better since more width of the case could be utilized (with 140mm based cooling).
C'est la vie...
true of many fans, but not true of the really good fans. vardar 140s, for example, do very well against vardar 120s. phanteks and noctua have some similarly high performing 140s. noise characteristics (both spl and sound quality) are generally better with 140s.
Тhat's exactly it. And the 120mm fans are certainly incomparable when accounting for the cumulative R&D budget.
With that said, 140mm fans have several not- insignificant advantages:
* Due to expansion card and motherboard dimensions (while not using flex-PCI-E solutions) they are a better solution for volumetric efficiency since we already need that dimension. (usually width)
* Speaking of dimensions 140mm fans (hence 140mm rads) have (when calculating crudely) around 35% more surface area. 120mm fans in turn have 26% less surface area. (depending on how you want to look at it)
* Before you argue that more space is wasted in the corners of 140mm fans, I would argue, as a counter..er.. argument that 140mm fans can have the same hub size as 120mm fans so it should be about equalized. Let's do some quick calculations, I have some NF- P12 here so Noctua will be used as an example. The hub diameter is around 40mm and the blade diameter is ~114mm. I don't have a NF- P14 here but the 140mm blades are in the neighbourhood of 130-135mm, I will use 132mm. If we calculate only the disk of the fan blades (assuming the same blade hub) we get around 124cm squared for the 140mm fan and ~89cm squared for 120mm fan which actually favours the 140mm fan with ~39-40% more surface area. (or the 120mm blade having ~28% less)
* I'm no expert but based on what I know the 140mm fans are yet to become as developed as the 120mm. I also see no physics barrier for the proper performance scaling since the 120mm (quality) fan hub can be quite large for the total fan dimension- hence I consider the 140mm as the "sweet spot". Mind you the 180mm and 200mm fans don't scale as well because of the mass increasing rapidly requiring a hub increase, as well as the decreased efficiency at the same thickness, and just some rudimentary reasoning- the atom size and electrostatic force are constant so as we go bigger we get more flex: hence more vibrations and more noise. (and I really, really dislike noise)
* With all of that said and the general underdeveloped state of the 140mm fan market they still perform (the good ones as jsco pointed out, though my personal favourite under 1000 RPM are NF-P14S Redux or BeQuiet Silent Wings 2 (120 or 140) in a pressure vs flow vs noise plot) as good as 120mm today. (check out the Xtremerigs radiator reviews and crunch some numbers for yourself, and Coolingtechnique and Hardware.fr for fan tests)
I also exclude all ball bearing fans from my selection since they have that whine at any rpm, hence no mention of the legendary GT's, although they scale magically when you can tolerate some noise (the best really in the 1200+ rpm to my knowledge). Fluid dynamics all the way for silence.
This is why I design my cases around cooling, and about a year ago when I gathered some knowledge I made the switch from 120mm to 140mm (size permitting of course).
I am not sure if this is considered thread polluting but the mods are welcome to transfer this post where appropriate.
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Thank you!
The community/site seems really neat!It was such a funny coincidence that I found this page! I saw the HardwareCanucks video (link) covering this case, when it came out, and it just so happened that I was trying to make my own "slim" cube case (link) and then found this site a few days later whilst looking for case dimensions/specifications!
Hopefully a decision can be reached regarding what to do after Thursday. Anything can happen, of course, but there's a TJ-08E and a pile of Dynamat staring at me and it's making me uncomfortable.
"Now you'll never reclaim enough desk space to use two monitors comfortably! You'll have neck strain forever, muahahaha!"
"Now you'll never reclaim enough desk space to use two monitors comfortably! You'll have neck strain forever, muahahaha!"
Welcome ShorteCut and Supercluster !
That is true, but the same could be said about every fan size increase. In SFF we need to find the optimal balance between performance, size and support. Sometimes the size will permit use of 140mm fans, sometimes it will require an increase in size.
Yes, people just got so excited about this stuff that they shopped for all sorts of cool gadgets without even thinking about the feasibility of the projects they were backing. And a lot also confused backing a project with investing in a company or just buying a product.
I do think that crowdfunding platforms do have a vested interest in not checking whether something is actually possible, as they will gain money if the project is backed, but in the end it's always the backers responsibility to make sure something will be possible.
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