Lots of good good discussion here. I just created my
Discord server and will be fairly active this coming week as I'll be on travel and I'll be working on the S402 design in my spare time.
As for the GPU slot topic: I think there's sufficient evidence to suggest that 2.5+ slot cards are becoming more "mainstream". Look at EVGA's website and you'll see that for every 20-series Turing card there's only 1 or 2 options for a 2-slot form factor card. AMD is fairly irrelevant here because my experience is that the people wanting to spend ~$200 on a case will also be looking for the highest performing card that their case (and budget) will afford. Every EVGA 2060 card they offer in the "half length" format is a 3-slot card. Gigabyte offers some interesting choices for "half length", 2-slot cards (to include a 2070 model) so I guess there are some 2-slot options out there.
What really confuses me is that the 20-series is supposed to be so much more power efficient than 10-series but the coolers on the custom models are so much larger. The conclusion I have reached is that the size increase is for reducing noise. Other options would be that while more efficient, the power envelope has increased. If you look at the different models and their cooling options, there seems to be a much wider range of stock base/boost speeds than I've noticed in the past. Keep in mind though that I'm an AMD fanboi so in general I haven't paid much attention to all the Nvidia options over the years.
I do plan on moving forward though with the 2.5+ design and when I get close to having a prototype made, I'll generate a render of the S401 and S402 side-by-side for a visual comparison. The difference will be negligible visually IMO. What I will be working on is maximizing the space required to get all these pieces to fit together well. One of the main challenges I need to solve is that of supporting up to a 120x240mm radiator underneath a 1-slot GPU. I think this is possible but I do wonder about the effectiveness. That said, I don't believe this would be a feature that would sell a lot of people on. For those that use air travel a lot, liquid cooling should not be an option at all - which is why expanding my air cooler support is important. Most units will be air-cooled only, but having the option of a 120 or 240 loop would be a "nice-to-have". It is possible that I drop the 120/240 radiator support, with the 240 being the most likely dropped as the 120 support is nowhere near as difficult to implement and support. With the thickness of the S402 increasing by 7mm over the S401, it also will lend itself to perhaps supporting 120mm radiator thicknesses up to 45mm when paired with 25mm thick fans. This all assumes the GPU will provide the necessary clearance. For 240mm radiators, the GPU would have to be a single-slot and then there *should* be a gap underneath the GPU of around 50mm for the radiator/fan combo.
So I need to wrap up this wall of text and get back to work. I wanted to let everyone know that I'm reading their comments and trying to think critically regarding the current S402 design and how it changes moving forward. Please keep the ideas coming.
