DAN C4-SFX - old

[newtothegame]

What do you think about this design?

My ignorant take on the matter is that it'd be better for you guys to decide what sort of case you want to produce. Originally the C4 was a 9.85L chasis and now it sits between 11 & 11,3L and is apparently oriented towards custom loop builds, it seems a bit unclear to me what purpose your design wants to serve.

I like your idea of having no venting holes on the side panels and aiming to create a new cooling solution for the case. As I'm no expert on the matter, I trust what Josh says about AIOs here:
Ultimately, these forums might be a "small" (pun intended) representation of who you want your customer base to be. My personal selfish desire would be seeing a C4 with exceptional air-cooled thermals which could also accommodate AIO support as an extra, but that is only me and I understand I don't represent in any way the majority of your potential buyers. Best of lucks and keep it up, here's hoping the C4 will be a success.

 

[chyll2]

My personal selfish desire would be seeing a C4 with exceptional air-cooled thermals which could also accommodate AIO support as an extra, but that is only me and I understand I don't represent in any way the majority of your potential buyers. Best of lucks and keep it up, here's hoping the C4 will be a success.

But the current layout is not Aircooling friendly because it was not meant to be aircooled. You have a heat source (GPU) blocking the air from a traditional air cooler. It was always meant to have liquid cooled CPU.

Dondan has repeatedly explained that he wants to explore and tweaks as much as possible (and I understand his point for that).

In the end though, majority of the people here are already saying, they are already okay with the existing design.

 

[dondan]

I think I should do a survey for this concept and what my customers really need.

 

[duke00]

i think you should make an test of the cooling concept in front of an survey. (An test with an wood box oder paper box)

 

[Hudbox]

Personally I was planning on single 240 AIO with the original design. Whilst the design toward a more custom cooling direction for CPU and GPU will make some happy, it is unfortunately for me beyond my requirements.

 

[chinyang]

This concept is really interesting... I believe it will work

However the same old question will be: do we really need 240mm for both cpu and gpu

gpu cooling is usually not a problem. Whether blower or open air style, with the original C4 design, pretty sure it can handle well no problem, even with modest OC i suspect. nowadays the open air design gpu designs are so good squeezing almost every bit of performance from the gpu without exotic cooling, the need for watercooled gpu is really in question. propably that's why watercooled gpu didn't really take off in the market.
water cooling a gpu is most likely out of interest rather than necessity.

this is a different story for cpu... without a giant aircooler to cool it in a sfx case, the only realistic way to tame a high performance cpu is water cooling it. this is a necessity.

this concept is really good for enthusiast than want to do custom water cooling both cpu, gpu and to experiment, but probably not what we need..

perforated front panel will change the aesthetics quite drastically.. i believe most enjoy the clean and sleek front panel from the previous offer, unless they are going for the RGB hype

 

[Nanook]

I look forward to seeing how much space is actually in there for custom loop components.

 

[tenrose]

i would like to see if we could mount two 120mm aio for cpu and gpu in the top instead of a shared 240mm rad.

 

[Metroversal]

I like the idea, but I was planning to use a single 240mm radiator. Actually, I wish that you keep both layouts and make different projects, but it's not happening I guess.

The case is kinda turning into an Enthusiasts oriented project, not a bad thing at all, but I'm curious to know how many of us will actually use 2x 240mm radiators.

Can't wait to see the look of the outer parts, especially the front panel and I/O ports... is really tough to beat the "old" design.

 

[Rankless]

The thing that concerns me most is that most 2000 series nvidia cards are 3-slot cards. If you were to assume that all users would be water-cooling their CPU, would it be possible to squeeze another 1/2 slot width of space?

 

[BioClue]

The thing that concerns me most is that most 2000 series nvidia cards are 3-slot cards. If you were to assume that all users would be water-cooling their CPU, would it be possible to squeeze another 1/2 slot width of space?

That's a good point, but the problem with adding 1/2 slot of space is that there will be a gab if a 2 slot open-air GPU is installed that will allow hot air to be trapped inside the case.

 

[BioClue]

I honestly don't think there will be a need for more than 240mm...not now not in the future... specially with the current GPU designs and the limitation of ITX mobo.
Unless the case can manage to squeeze ATX mobo.

 

[dondan]

Sorry 3 slot is out of discussion. These cards are not necessary so i have no plans to support them.

 

[tenrose]

Sorry 3 slot is out of discussion. These cards are not necessary so i have no plans to support them.

that's a bit of a shame to be honest.

 

[GanglesKahn]

Personally, I am looking for "the smallest case that I can find where I can fit in a full custom loop". There don't seem to really be many cases (that I've found yet) which meet this need. I'm currently eyeing the Mach One with interest, but I'd be very interested in the C4 if it continued to go the full custom loop route. So I seem to be in the current target demographic, but that could be outside the norm for people looking for SFF cases.

 

[NIIV3X]

Sorry 3 slot is out of discussion. These cards are not necessary so i have no plans to support them.

And 2.75 Slot GPUs (not kidding actually ) This definition of 'slots' is pretty vague for me even if it seems to be the norm among distributers etc. I am not that knowledgable on topics like these, excuse me for that especially if it could be considered off topic here! Regardless I'd like to know if I would be able squeeze one in, although I've read that 2.5 is your defined max range.

 

[dapperlilsailor]

I'm kinda looking at this case from an enthusiast/completionist perspective. What draws me to this project is the idea of a high-quality, well thought out and discussed design that allows me to build something I'll never really want to change again. This means custom loop compatibility, and enough potential radiator surface to cool high-end components with moderate overclocking, along with an elegant and highly portable design that's superficially simple and well engineered enough to age gracefully. I looked at the A-4 for the longest time but never bit because I knew I'd eventually want a build without compromises, and I'd have to leave it behind. I'm hoping this will be the case that ends all cases for me @dondan so take as much time as you want. I'm probably in the minority here but I'm honestly willing to wait years.

 

[SashaLag]

Sorry 3 slot is out of discussion. These cards are not necessary so i have no plans to support them.

Supporting 3 slot cards would be far more mainstream than supporting a 2 240mm radiators...
May not be the case you want to build, but for sure it would be a more successful case to be sold...
just my 2 cent as I would totally buy a 3 slot, 1 240mm radiator C4-SFX case but I wouldn't buy a 480mm rad, 2 fan case!

Probably at least... I'm curious to see the outcome of that pool! Anyway I agree with @duke00 . Before posting any pool, please, provide some test for us, so we can evaluate better!

 

[Tephnos]

My vote still goes to the original design.

I currently (having read through several pages after a few months) get the impression that you're stuck in development hell. It seems you don't actually know what you want to make because you keep changing major things about the case (even as ideas, they still slow down the progress of the existing design). The more this happens, the less I feel that the case I want is ever going to see the light of day.

The latest ideas you've posted are very enthusiast-oriented and will limit the audience of your case, compared to the original. The original design to me feels like a natural successor to the M1, improving on it in a lot of ways (sleeker, smaller). This is what I feel most of your customers would want, considering how the M1 was the product that IMO, brought SFF further into the mainstream and, to this day, is what people think of when an 'end game' SFF case comes to mind.

But what do you want to do, Dan? I feel like you could make just another case, or make something quite special; maybe that's just me, though. The A4 was a great case, but the CPU cooling limitations made things difficult. You've solved this with the original design of the C4.

 

[Arboreal]

My vote still goes to the original design.
/snip
The A4 was a great case, but the CPU cooling limitations made things difficult. You've solved this with the original design of the C4.

As a dedicated air cooling user, (I don't trust WC rigs for regular transport), I do feel that this is moving away from my particular needs.
I think that @Tephnos sees the current C4 trajectory in the same way that I do - a nicely worded assessment.
As it happens, I bought a used NCase M1 a couple of weeks ago, so have spent my 'case fund' money for the year.
This doesn't look to be a problem for missing out on a C4, as it's as far away from production soon as it has ever been.

Still following the development with interest, keep up the good work @dondan. Although I may not like a particular design variant or direction, I fully appreciate that there are plenty of others with differing requirement to mine. I do regret the potential growth in size to accommodate a lot more WC hardware, sub 10L was a perfect size for my needs and a much better shape than my current (noisy) SG13 case.