Production Lazer3D - LZ XTD - Alternative Designs

CC Ricers

Shrink Ray Wielder
Bronze Supporter
Nov 1, 2015
2,233
2,556
This case looks legit. I was suprised to see it in /r/sffpc and remembered this old thread where you were tossing around concepts for more slots or longer cards and was wondering if any of them would come to fruition.

And that pattern overlay on the clear panels is etched? It looks very good. You had me, I thought it was a vinyl wrap but etching sounds a lot better and makes it part of the plastic.
 

K888D

SFF Guru
Original poster
Lazer3D
Feb 23, 2016
1,483
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www.lazer3d.com
This case looks legit. I was suprised to see it in /r/sffpc and remembered this old thread where you were tossing around concepts for more slots or longer cards and was wondering if any of them would come to fruition.

And that pattern overlay on the clear panels is etched? It looks very good. You had me, I thought it was a vinyl wrap but etching sounds a lot better and makes it part of the plastic.

Thanks, the etching came out really well, allot better than I was expecting for such a large area. I experimented with different resolutions, power speed to get a nice balance. the good thing about the etched area is you can hold the panels/case in these areas and it leaves no finger prints compared to the gloss areas, makes handling the case much easier.
 

Phuncz

Lord of the Boards
SFFn Staff
May 9, 2015
5,836
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The case's internal design looks interesting and I'm glad to see an extended variant for more powerful GPUs ! The etching also looks amazing, together with the white panels, that'll look cool with some nice single color LED lighting. Well done !
 

Poblopuablo

King of Cable Management
Jan 14, 2018
816
465
Idk how to vote... If it's still possible.

Design 1 is nice, but I would love to see if it could be a litter more vertical. So if possible, turn it 90° along one of the long sides? (Takes up less desk real estate. Lol
 

K888D

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Lazer3D
Feb 23, 2016
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Idk how to vote... If it's still possible.

The vote is now irrelevant, unfortunately I can't remove the vote from the thread as those tools have been removed from the thread options.

I would love to see if it could be a litter more vertical. So if possible, turn it 90° along one of the long sides? (Takes up less desk real estate

I'm working on a concept similar to this, a true tower case but with a twist, literally.
 

K888D

SFF Guru
Original poster
Lazer3D
Feb 23, 2016
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Made a few minor tweaks to the top and side panels and used Smoked Acrylic material for them, the etching came out really nice with an almost metallic look to it. What do you think:


I've not got pictures of the assembled case yet, but it looks pretty darn special.
 

Nanook

King of Cable Management
May 23, 2016
805
793
Made a few minor tweaks to the top and side panels and used Smoked Acrylic material for them, the etching came out really nice with an almost metallic look to it. What do you think:


I've not got pictures of the assembled case yet, but it looks pretty darn special.
This looks great!
 
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orbitalwalsh

Caliper Novice
Jan 4, 2018
29
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@K888D

love the design, was going to buy your Case and modify to have PSU face down next to mobo but never got the chance :(
think i worked out space of 40mm from board edge allowed Aorus or MSI Gaming X to just fit in

worth allowing it to take triple slot coolers . most of the RTX designs are 2.5/2.75 and long - if you can allow short form ATX units like FOCUS Gold 140mm then should add some length and possible height for nice air cooler :D
 
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K888D

SFF Guru
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Lazer3D
Feb 23, 2016
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@K888D

love the design, was going to buy your Case and modify to have PSU face down next to mobo but never got the chance :(
think i worked out space of 40mm from board edge allowed Aorus or MSI Gaming X to just fit in

worth allowing it to take triple slot coolers . most of the RTX designs are 2.5/2.75 and long - if you can allow short form ATX units like FOCUS Gold 140mm then should add some length and possible height for nice air cooler :D

Thanks for the comments!

For this particular design I wanted it to remain compatible with the LZ7 with minimal new parts required to upgrade the case. This means that the width and the height of the case are fixed and cannot be modified, changing these dimensions will mean completely new corner pieces, are required which are the most expensive part of the case. It would be like buying a whole new case as every component is different.

Whilst it would be nice for this case to be able to fit 2.5 slot cards, once you start widening and heightening the case the volume starts to rapidly increase. At that point it gets into M1 or Cerberus territory which already do a great job of fitting triple slot cards.

I think it still has justifiable benefits increasing the case length from ITX to reference length GPU's even when sticking to standard dual slot, it will be compatible with many more cards and CPU cooling possibilities than the standard LZ7 layout currently is. Hope that makes sense?
 

masteraleph

SFF Lingo Aficionado
May 28, 2017
91
64
So it looks to me like the U9s becomes the standard cooler for this case, in the same way that the NH-L12s is the standard for the Lz7?
 

LeonM

Cable Smoosher
May 4, 2018
12
30
Made a few minor tweaks to the top and side panels and used Smoked Acrylic material for them, the etching came out really nice with an almost metallic look to it. What do you think:


I've not got pictures of the assembled case yet, but it looks pretty darn special.

This is freakin awesome! I think its perfect for my current all gray LZ7 case.

 

K888D

SFF Guru
Original poster
Lazer3D
Feb 23, 2016
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Testing out the extended case with something a little different:


I wanted an RGB fan for glowing through the top smoked panel, but for some reason I can't get this Akasa fan working with the Strix motherboard :(
 

K888D

SFF Guru
Original poster
Lazer3D
Feb 23, 2016
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Here are the promised photos of the XTD prototype v0.2, above with a solid walnut front and below with a black front panel. The side and top panels are dark smoked gloss with the front half being laser etched to create a lighter shade frosted matte surface.


Below is with a grey front panel which matches the etched surface shade quite closely, but I personally prefer the contrast with the black front:


You can see the 360 GPU exhaust ventilation has been kept extending right to the front of the case, this is an important feature of the LZ7 that allows the GPU to operate with impressive results in a confined space. From our initial testing we have seen that carrying this feature through to the XTD also gives impressive results for full length graphics cards (more detail on this in a bit).

Next up is a side view of the Case Fan panel with Vandal Power Switch:



And the rear view, this layout can use the existing DC-DC rear panel from the LZ7 range, the power input opening can be closed off with the included blanking adapter plate. This rear panel includes an 80/92mm fan mount which works great in combination with tower coolers like the Noctua NH-U9s for exhausting directly out the case (like this).




The graphics card intake vents have also been extended in proportion with the case, allowing for the dual fan cards to breath in plenty of cool fresh air:


So that's the case, now onto some quick benchmarks.

I've managed to briefly test both a GTX 1080 Ti and RTX 2080 in this prototype. First up is the EVGA GTX 1080 Ti SC Black Edition:


This card is 269mm in length which is a couple of mm longer than reference length which I didn't realise, so the card is actually touching the inside front panel of the case, the next revision of the XTD will have a few extra mm.

The system features an Asus Z370 STRIX motherboard, with an 8700k overclocked to 5.0Ghz and 16Gb of 3200Mhz RAM. For CPU cooling I am using the Silverstone NT06-PRO Nitrogen, the reason I picked this cooler was it because it could clear RGB RAM and have a 120mm fan mounted on top which I wanted for the RGB effects in my next set of photos.


The benchmark score for this system can be seen over in the PPL round 2 thread, with the GPU scoring a monstrous 10,086 graphics score in 3DMARK Timespy. The GTX 1080 Ti was slightly overclocked to the best of my (limited) ability.

For comparison the graphics card was swapped out with an NVidia RTX 2080 Founders Edition, the rest of the system remained the same. In 3DMARK Timespy (at stock clocks) it scored 9,850 a couple hundred points less than the overclocked GTX 1080 Ti.




For testing GPU thermals I used Unigine Valley @ 1080p highest settings on loop for half an hour, I know this isn't the most demanding test on the entire system but i just wanted to get a quick result that singled out the GPU with a decent gaming type scenario.

Both the EVGA SC and RTX FE were tested under the same conditions, both cards running at factory settings.

The GTX 1080 Ti stabilised at 66C with a boost clock 1923Mhz (reported by Precision X) and a fan speed of 1500rpm, whilst the RTX 2080 stabilised at 72C with a boost clock of 2100Mhz (reported by the Valley inlay readings). I'm not sure what the fan speed of the RTX card was but its fans were around the same noise level as the EVGA which incidentally was spookily quiet.

I ran one final test just on the GTX 1080Ti stepping the resolution of unigine Valley up to 1440p. The EVGA SC card stabilised at 68C with a boost clock of 1911MHz and a fan speed of 1720rpm and was again very quiet (subjective I know).

Thanks for reading and to finish the post off, here are some shots of the RTX 2080 inside the XTD prototype:









 

Kdrs0122

Caliper Novice
Aug 28, 2018
30
30
Do you think this case can fit a r9 fury-x and its aio (or some other watercooled gpu set up) using a low profile cooler? If so would a sfx psu still fit or would the dc-dc option be better?