Hey Saper, I'm planning on modding the case to accommodate the airflow design of the new 3080 cards. For best results I'd like to directly match the powder coating used in the production run of my Sentry (1.1 unit number 1038). I understand if y'all don't want to give away your trade secrets and all, so don't worry about me if you can't give that away. I'll be fine with trying to match it on my own.
For the colour/tone, if you have a black case, essentially a matte black automotive lacquer fixture will do. But standard matte black, not metalic, not space something, not gold-ish black, flat matte black.
If you have a white case and you want to drill holes in it without repainting the whole cover, it will be a bloody mess as matching a white on white fixture or nail polish lacquer or something like that will always be visible on white, you will see it even when the tone is exactly right because the structure of the paint will be different and because of that the light will reflect differently from the surface. Your touch up places around the modded spots will have flat surface that will get glossy.
If you want to do it properly, go with it to the shop that does powder coating and show it to them, tell them that this is a high graininess powder coating ask them if they can source a matching powder in structure and colour. And then find a shop that does paint stripping with professional chemical submersion paint stripping line and not just guys at the shop that will spray the element because you'll end up with a lot of leftovers from old paint in the perforation and either you'll have bad spots there or they will damage the panel by scrubbing off the rest.
Do the modding after taking off the powder coating and powder coat it again at a shop.
If you have a black unit, you could try drilling and touching up the paint with automotive fixture, but make sure to do this with a table fixed drill and not an off-hand and make sure the element is fixed properly, and drill from the outside of the cover and not from the inside. If you go from the inside you might end up with big chunks of paint break off around the holes. The automotive lacquer fixture will be good for touching up hole edges, but not bigger surfaces as again you'll end up with different surface effect.
@SaperPL Seeing the awesome thermals of the Founders edition on the 3080 and considering that we will probably not see any blower models coming out, I am considering drilling holes on the other side of the Sentry 2.0 in order to accommodate for that second fan. That way I will also get zero amount of hot air on my CPU as well. Would you recommend that? Any problems that could come up because of this? Should I follow a specific process?
One thing is that whether you will do the good job on this or make a mess of the paint. Look at what I've just wrote above.
Second thing is that what kind of holes you want to make - same kind of perforation, then it's okay, but drilling a huge circular hole like the one Paul did in his video, you might damage the inlet and the cover will start flexing and not coming together well on some spots because of that.
Third thing is that maybe you could get away with just sealing off the card compartment with a fitted sheet of metal and using the open air board partner model.
All in all, I would recommend to wait for some SFF specific comparative tests of board partner designs against the FE model, I'm interested in how EVGA XC3 will work out to be specific.
The whole issue with this pass-through fan design on FE you are not noticing is that once again this is a problem of how much people will actually buy this kind of card in the current generation. Whether there are drawback of this kind of design that we don't know about yet. After a year it may look like there is no FE models on the market because there's no interest in it and people went mostly after board partner designs. If that happens, we end up with a case modified/redesigned specifically for one generation of cards that came up, was glorious and went away and we have now a perforation that breaks the aesthetics/design of the case.
It's not like we are ignoring the issue. It's that we haven't found a correct solution for it yet, and we don't have all the data we need to make a decision about this. If the XC3 card gets tested in SFF and it gets similar performance without the need of pass-through perforation, then it might mean we'll stick to the current design because there's no magic about this new flow design. But again, this new FE design might be something that would especially work out perfectly for Sentry on a vertical stand if it had a pass through vent and this would be a free cheat code to enable great performance in Sentry, and it might mean Sentry (and other console layout cases) gets better performance than back-2-back layouts because they will have to push the air through the PSU.
We have tried drawing various designs for it (handling this card) since the leaks of these cards popped up and it always comes back to either making a random vent not matching rest of the cover aesthetically (and you do want a nicely designed piece on your desk) or making the cover inlet safety functionality useless on top of making the whole construction more complex and expensive to manufacture because of that.
So before all of you pick up the drill and damage your cases, get a photo of the case, put it in photoshop or gimp and try designing the new vent and see if you like the effect.