Would winter one be available from any channel other than kickstarter ?
Yes. Batch 2 and beyond will be sold on the Winter Design Co website. You can currently
Sign Up To Get Notified about when Batch 2 orders open.
Expect this to happen after Batch 1 ships.
What happened to the torx screws? Would like torx over those strip-painting-slip-inducing Phillips screws. I just got a NR200 and i still managed to chip some paint off the screws.
That middle bracket looks very interesting. Would it be possible to see a clean pic of it.
This is something I've been debating about for a while. Torx drivers are not very common, whereas philips drivers are quite common, meaning most people would have them laying around the house. Furthermore, most hardware stores carry Philips screws, so finding a replacement screw would be far easier. We've also seen repair websites give lower repairability ratings to anything that uses Torx screw. The other issue is that I have not seen too many reliable suppliers of good Torx screws with black oxide coatings. The next best option, and possibly what would represent a good middle ground, is including a hex key and some hex-drive screws, similar to the FormD T1...
I'm curious as to what people would prefer between Philips w/ no included tool, and Hex drive flat heads, with an included L-key? I'm a bit wary of using Torx because I find that the benefits it provides over a hex drive are not so great that it warrants the extra inconvenience. (I'm aware that Apple uses Torx, but they also do it because they
don't want you inside their machines
)
As for the central beam, yeah, I'll be posting more images of it soon.
Thank you very much for the update. Please could you test this with the fan in both configs (pulling through heat sink and exhausting out) - hopefully this won't be too much of a drag as the fan is secured using a clip. I assume exhaust will be bad because it will be right up against the solid side panel but would be fine with perforated. I currently have the blackridge cooler and it's significantly louder in the pull config, but cools about 10% better. However this is with a 92mm slim noctua so they get a fair bit noiser than the 120mm.
Sidenote about the SPK - will it come with a mounting backplate? I added the noctua l9a backplate to the blackridge and it improved thermals under aida64 stress FPU load by a further 5-10%.
Cheers and thank you for your continued work.
Intake will perform better than exhaust, even with the perforated panels, as the bottom / top fans in the perforated panel configuration are designed to fling hot exhaust out of the enclosure, and assist in the intake of cool / fresh air from the sides, directly into the GPU cooler / CPU cooler. Also, during the Beta Program,
@JDragon did test an L12 in the Winter One with solid panels, and found that intake even against the side panels, performed a *lot* better than exhaust. It had to do with fast moving air in Winter One quickly removing the exhaust if it was flung out from the fan, while there was always cool air around the intake.
The SPK will have a sensible mounting system, yes.
You are my hero, thank you very much for your professionalism.
I couldn't hope for better
I will be doing validation and verification for every batch. That includes statistical dimensional reports via CMM, as well as material sampling and testing (to ensure that alloying is good, and materials are up to the specification set forth). The manufacturers invovled understand that I want to uphold a level of quality. It's not lack of trust, but simply the way we do things because we agreed to hold ourselves to a high standard. Mistakes and errors happen: tool calibration drifts, and bits and bearings wear out, and sometimes metallurgy creates a bad batch.
It's also part of being responsible, environmentally. CMM uses a bit of electricity, and adds time. But it doesn't add much carbon footprint, and the energy / carbon costs are astronomically higher if you have 3 bad parts / 100, as opposed to 0 or 1, that all have to take a return flight to the factory, as *another* set of parts is dispatched to each of those individuals. The added carbon footprint is crazy.
Trust, but Verify.
