Production SENTRY 2.0: Evolution of console-sized gaming PC case

[newtothegame]

Great job Dr Zaber, this Sentry 2 looks incredible.

After following Louqe's Ghost project for a while now, I've gotta say that you guys are doing a great job in terms of communication and that alone has made me shift my case preference towards this Sentry. I'd love to leave some feedback but because I'm a noob in industrial design terms, I can only leave a few questions (hopefully they are not too simplistic or redundant):

I've seen some miniITX motherboards with a NVMe slot on the back, could temps be an issue for rear-mounted NVMe's? Is there enough space between the motherboard and the back of the case to keep a possible NVMe ssd cool?
I was also wondering if the AIO is required or if a low profile fan for the CPU could also do the trick.
Would more chasis perforations lower the overall temps significantly or would that be too detrimental to the general sturdiness of the case? Are the current perforations based on performance or is it a design choice? (just curious about this one)
Do you have an estimate average price for the case?

Thanks, keep it up!

 

[SaperPL]

I've seen some miniITX motherboards with a NVMe slot on the back, could temps be an issue for rear-mounted NVMe's? Is there enough space between the motherboard and the back of the case to keep a possible NVMe ssd cool?

That depends on your SSD and your use.

One thing is that we are kind of bound by ATX specs so there has to be at least 6,35 mm of clearance from the bottom while M.2 can take up to 5.4 mm if I remember correctly. We have 7 mm because of metric standoffs and 8 mm in the middle because of the cutout in the middle of piece holding those standoffs. If we were to make more space here, this would mean shrinking space for CPU cooler.

There is no airflow under the motherboard in Sentry, so essentially it's question whether you put so much load on your nvme SSD to overheat or not. If you do, then you can grab some aircraft paint remover and clear out the spot just below the nvme drive controller and put a thick thermal pad in between - this way you can dissipate the heat through the case itself. It won't be great cooling, but should be enough for such thing as nvme controller.

The memory modules on nvme drives themselves shouldn't be cooled though as those like to work in high temps as I recall.

I was also wondering if the AIO is required or if a low profile fan for the CPU could also do the trick.

That will obviously depend on your CPU. If you're okay with 65W TDP CPU, then something like R7 1700/2700, R5 1600/2600 or non-K intel CPUs should be okay with Noctua NH-L9i/a. Those Ryzen CPUs might also be okay even with wraith stealth with replaced fan - stock fan is really tall, check this to see what I'm talking about:


65W TDP intel CPUs should work okay with stock cooler, may work a bit better with copper core boxed cooler, but sadly it's not shipping with 95W CPUs anymore so those may run out from ebay at some point.

There should be 45W TDP ryzen chips coming as well, but there's no specific info on release date - the R5 2600E/R7 2700E. Intel also usually releases 45W and 35W TDP models - S & T variants. Those should work even better with low profile coolers or simply stock box coolers (intel).

The point of AIO liquid cooler is to be able to support 95W and hopefully 105W TDP CPUs because there are people who need more raw CPU power than the GPU and can accept the drawbacks of ITX-sized GPU to be able to cool the CPU in our chassis. There will also be people who simply want to put the top notch CPU in their rig.

So far I'm skeptical on support for 105W TDP CPUs like R7 2700X after seeing how it actually performs - okay, it can game, but when you put a full load like rendering on that, the temps skyrocket really fast. You should either go for R7 2700 which is 65W if you need those 8 cores or you can simply go for R5 2600X if you just want high clocks.

Would more chasis perforations lower the overall temps significantly or would that be too detrimental to the general sturdiness of the case? Are the current perforations based on performance or is it a design choice? (just curious about this one)

Perforation increase is obviously performance based choice. For first Sentry it wasn't enough for 95W TDP CPUs which quite a lot of users put inside, and we wanted to fix that issue.

There is of course slight reduce of rigidity on the perforation area, but corners and structural elements are still pretty sturdy. We have also cut down some material on the internal structure but we have taken it where it doesn't affect the case rigidity.

Do you have an estimate average price for the case?

That's a tough one at this point because we will have to get updated pricing on each supply - risers, cables, switches, screws etc.

We don't want to do that yet because suppliers give us good bulk prices when we initially talk to them, but if we get back to them after few months when we actually need to place order, they are pulling stuff like "steel and aluminium prices rose from last time we spoke - +25% unit price for you" because they feel that we have no time to waste on looking for another supplier.

It's probably going to be something between 200€ and 230€ and we're going onward with euro because dollars were pretty unstable since the current US presidency started...

 

[newtothegame]

Thanks a lot for the detailed answers SaperPL, I hadn't considered many of the points you've raised and also now I have a better grasp of the complexities and challenges of designing sff chasis. Though balance but definitely worth it, I'll have to tune my future build accordingly. That being said, I'll be looking forward to the release of the Sentry 2.0, thanks again!

 

[NuclearLemons]

If you mean perforating the cover above the radiator then it's not technically a problem, there's no fluid anything like that inside, but it may get loud if you do that and also you may end up bleeding hot air inside (depending on the flow direction) making the whole air pocket useless.



Powder coat is a solid base... for another layer of powder coating, but if you do that you might have a hard time fitting PSU and assembling the case because it will get thicker everywhere.

Other type of paint may not stick to it properly. You should use aircraft paint remover to strip the powder coating off the case. Note that it may be toxic so take safety precautions. You may also have your case stripped from paint in a shop that is stripping paint from car wheel rims.

thank you for the detailed reply! odds are ill have to look at stripping it then, thanks, I suppose what I meant by holes was to have the radiator intake air on one side and exhaust it out the other. if its safe to drill ill consider it but as you have brought up, it might affect my other temps. I need to put a fan in my lower chamber anyway, the area around my motherboard without any airflow has been... toasty.

 

[Nomo]

That depends on your SSD and your use.

65W TDP intel CPUs should work okay with stock cooler, may work a bit better with copper core boxed cooler, but sadly it's not shipping with 95W CPUs anymore so those may run out from ebay at some point.

There should be 45W TDP ryzen chips coming as well, but there's no specific info on release date - the R5 2600E/R7 2700E. Intel also usually releases 45W and 35W TDP models - S & T variants. Those should work even better with low profile coolers or simply stock box coolers (intel).

The point of AIO liquid cooler is to be able to support 95W and hopefully 105W TDP CPUs because there are people who need more raw CPU power than the GPU and can accept the drawbacks of ITX-sized GPU to be able to cool the CPU in our chassis. There will also be people who simply want to put the top notch CPU in their rig.

So far I'm skeptical on support for 105W TDP CPUs like R7 2700X after seeing how it actually performs - okay, it can game, but when you put a full load like rendering on that, the temps skyrocket really fast. You should either go for R7 2700 which is 65W if you need those 8 cores or you can simply go for R5 2600X if you just want high clocks.



Perforation increase is obviously performance based choice. For first Sentry it wasn't enough for 95W TDP CPUs which quite a lot of users put inside, and we wanted to fix that issue.

Hi,

Cryorig Full-Copper C7 Cu Heatsink would handle and optimize the performance temps in this case?

 

[SaperPL]

Hi,

Cryorig Full-Copper C7 Cu Heatsink would handle and optimize the performance temps in this case?

I'll first have to see how normal C7 will behave with new perforation since it was quite loud in the original Sentry because it's not actually made to face the perforation this close.

I'm also not so keen on testing it because I don't have the AM4 kit for my C7 - I filed request for AM4 kit at their side twice with no response...

Finally, I remember someone tested this Cu version and it wasn't that much of a difference from aluminium version.

 

[masteraleph]

It’s not out yet, but the Alpenföhn Black Ridge would be the best if it performs how it should (this iteration of the case isn’t out yet either, of course).

 

[SaperPL]

It’s not out yet, but the Alpenföhn Black Ridge would be the best if it performs how it should (this iteration of the case isn’t out yet either, of course).

I'm interested in it, but I will have to see first how its layout will look. It will probably slightly differ from what dan designed and that may mean some incompatibility with Sentry, especially with the hard drives being above the motherboard.

 

[SaperPL]

Here's another update on the performance with additional configurations - with AIO in horizontal orientation and with NH-L9i in vertical orientation. Horizontal orientation on the latter will be made as soon as possible, I didn't have enough time to capture all footage for it. First video also here to simplify things. EDIT: Added last video


I have to explain my reasoning behind giving you this test data as captured footage rather than combining them into charts with idle/avg/max temps. I know this is boring as hell to watch all of this and I know comparing one to another (AIO vs air, vertical vs horizontal) will not be perfectly easy.

First of all compiled data doesn't show exactly how the hardware behaves. If I were to record max temps reached, those will show the spikes when cooling didn't catch up to the increase load yet.

Second thing is the fact that charts don't show how temperatures correlate to the load and clocks. This is especially important in terms of GPU because a lot of people don't get how turbo boost works and will take a single number from all of the data without understanding the correlation and base their opinion on that single number, and what can be even worse will pick their hardware based on that.

So this way, by having all the footage with all required data shown on top of it, almost "frame by frame" you can run the same benchmark on your own system and see how it correlates to that. It also helps us do the same thing - we can get back to this captured footage and see how it behaves in specific workload etc.

Finally compiled performance data will definitely come with reviews anyway, but those won't show you this kind footage like we are releasing here.

I hope that's fair enough explanation for this way of doing it.


Getting to some basic analysis of the tests and what you can and should take a note of:

1) Ryzen 7 2700X shows temp 10°C higher to shift fan curve up and speed up the fan. I only realised this after capturing the footage and it seems to be riva tuner statistic server not handling this exception. Core Temp shows 10 degree lower temp that is usually matching what 2600X has at the same desktop workload. If you take that 10 degree difference into account, it actually shows that 2700X is often slightly cooler than 2600X on the same workload because the fan is spinning faster at this point.

2) There are timestamps in each video description. Ashes of Singularity is a good test to see how CPU intensive workloads perform.

3) Take note of GPU load and temperature when seeing turbo clocks of 1800+ MHz and when seeing base 1607 MHz clock.

4) All tests were made without VSync meaning there was no FPS limitation on the workload. If you are using a 60 Hz 1080p panel to play games with VSync then your load will be limited and you will get lower temps.

5) In horizontal position limited access to fresh air for both GPU and AIO will heat up the GPU faster to target temperature of 80 degrees and it will really quick drop down clock to base 1607 MHz.

6) With 105W TDP CPU AIO may bleed hot air to GPU in horizontal position with CPU intensive workloads.

7) Youtube annotations are not supported anymore and therefore there's a note in form of poll attached to each video.

 

[cyberhoundMkII]

I might be asking something that has been discussed already, but it's hard to catch up with everything here and in v1 topic, but I generally came to the conclusion that horizontal position with demanding hardware is basically a no go with this case? I want to put a 8700 and 1080ti into a horizontal case and not melt it, so far this was my last option and I feel it won't work. I really want that GPU to run at full capacity in the smallest form possible.

I saw that Modivio xCase has the option to have riser all the way to the other side to allow GPU rotated on the same side as CPU, which sounds like a very reasonable solution for better temps in horizontal position, since nothing will struggle with pulling the air from the bottom. Any obvious reason why this is not going to happen here that I'm missing or was discussed before?

What is a reasonable, honest estimate of this case being available to purchase? Any updates? Thanks!

 

[SaperPL]

I might be asking something that has been discussed already, but it's hard to catch up with everything here and in v1 topic, but I generally came to the conclusion that horizontal position with demanding hardware is basically a no go with this case? I want to put a 8700 and 1080ti into a horizontal case and not melt it, so far this was my last option and I feel it won't work. I really want that GPU to run at full capacity in the smallest form possible.

It's not about melting the GPU, but what clocks you get on it. If it works on base clocks when fully loaded for prolonged time, then it's okay, if it drops below base clocks, then it is bad.

As for 8700 (non-K) it should be fine in Sentry 2.0

As for 1080TI in horizontal position - I'd recommend going for blower if you want to use it horizontally - it will pull fresh air from the side as well this way.

I saw that Modivio xCase has the option to have riser all the way to the other side to allow GPU rotated on the same side as CPU, which sounds like a very reasonable solution for better temps in horizontal position, since nothing will struggle with pulling the air from the bottom. Any obvious reason why this is not going to happen here that I'm missing or was discussed before?

It takes more space to do this, either below the motherboard for the riser to not intrude motherboard clearance so you loose the CPU cooling height, or you waste lot of space to angle the riser around the GPU. Also really expensive riser required which is heated either by the back of GPU or CPU.

What is a reasonable, honest estimate of this case being available to purchase? Any updates? Thanks!

Reasonable response is that we don't want to state any dates at this point. We have to order another prototype with fixes based on what we've got with this first one, but there are few things we have to figure out before we can do that. After that goes the package design and tooling for its production, prototype/review batch and preparations for gathering orders/campaign.

Note that we are not a pc hardware manufacturing company in our main scope of business and there are other bigger projects that are occupying our time.

 

[zustroy]

Do you have updates in the meantime? Thanks!

 

[efegue]

@SaperPL any chance of testing the GPU with one of the Arctic VGA coolers? My GTX 1070 dropped temps by 20ºC with those coolers, I get max load 58-60ºC on my current case.

I'm not sure the GPU would fit with this cooler, but worth a shot, the cooler is cheap and very effective, I'm using the Mono Plus.
https://www.arctic.ac/eu_en/products/cooling/vga.html

Thanks!

 

[SaperPL]

@SaperPL any chance of testing the GPU with one of the Arctic VGA coolers? My GTX 1070 dropped temps by 20ºC with those coolers, I get max load 58-60ºC on my current case.

I'm not sure the GPU would fit with this cooler, but worth a shot, the cooler is cheap and very effective, I'm using the Mono Plus.
https://www.arctic.ac/eu_en/products/cooling/vga.html

Thanks!

If you are talking about air coolers/those beefy radiators, then they simply won't fit, they are too thick. Those are like 2.5~3 slot wide.

If you are talking about the water cooler, then it has a backplate that is too thick to fit inside. Also it would be counter productive to do this inside Sentry. In tower chassis this lets you vent the radiator more efficiently by moving it to the wall of the case and also the volume of water delays the heating up of the cooler. In Sentry you would just get the water volume here. It makes sense for the CPU to have the AIO because you can't fit a huge radiator for CPU within 48 mm, but you can have a card with full length radiator and three fans like gigabyte windforce 3x.

 

[efegue]

Yeah the problem is that every GPU radiator/cooler that comes with your graphics card suck. Most of the GPU's goes to high 70's - 80's with default cooler.. with a simple https://www.arctic.ac/eu_en/accelero-mono-plus.html my gtx 1070 temperatures never goes above 60º on load and I can get a stable boost clock without any problem.

 

[SaperPL]

Yeah the problem is that every GPU radiator/cooler that comes with your graphics card suck. Most of the GPU's goes to high 70's - 80's with default cooler.. with a simple https://www.arctic.ac/eu_en/accelero-mono-plus.html my gtx 1070 temperatures never goes above 60º on load and I can get a stable boost clock without any problem.

It's not that it's cooling suck it goes to 80 degrees. 80~ish degrees is target temperature for boost. Coolers are optimised for this.

My question here is - does your GTX 1070 stay on full boost clock with that lower temperature? The clocks are what matters here and 80 degrees is not something to be scared off for GPU. Also are you playing with vsync?

If you have a strix card or something like this with beefier power section, then cooling is also beefier because it can push more power to boost more. On standard card it shouldn't matter too much to have beefier cooler if power delivery will cap the performance. The only thing you can achieve is boosting on full load IF your new cooler can actually drop down the temperature at full loads.

 

[efegue]

It's not that it's cooling suck it goes to 80 degrees. 80~ish degrees is target temperature for boost. Coolers are optimised for this.

My question here is - does your GTX 1070 stay on full boost clock with that lower temperature? The clocks are what matters here and 80 degrees is not something to be scared off for GPU. Also are you playing with vsync?

If you have a strix card or something like this with beefier power section, then cooling is also beefier because it can push more power to boost more. On standard card it shouldn't matter too much to have beefier cooler if power delivery will cap the performance. The only thing you can achieve is boosting on full load IF your new cooler can actually drop down the temperature at full loads.

Yeah it stays, 2100MHz+ at all times, it's perfect. With the old GPU cooler it would just downclock lower than 2000MHz on boost and be noisy as hell at 70ºC, it's night and day with that cooler.. you should try it sometime.. I bought it for 25 EUR or so...

 

[bookdaren]

Will it be able to fit asus strix gtx1070oc ? (I know the first version doesn't)

 

[SaperPL]

Will it be able to fit asus strix gtx1070oc ? (I know the first version doesn't)

Nope, we have added 2 mm to GPU space by moving the center wall to fit GTX 1080 mini from Gigabyte, but it's not enough to fit strix/ftw series.

 

[Rebel640]

Nope, we have added 2 mm to GPU space by moving the center wall to fit GTX 1080 mini from Gigabyte, but it's not enough to fit strix/ftw series.

Hello Dr Zaber, is there any update on how far off the kickstarter/production is now in months?