Portal Themed Aperture Laboratories NZXT Phantom Mod

I have had my NZXT Phantom for almost a year, as my academic year came to a close I decided I needed to makes some changes that had been sitting in my head for many months.

My Phantom As it Was last August shortly after transferring my build from an NZXT Gamma:


Around the end of december





The day I received my Phantom I performed one simple mod, I painted the area under the black mesh covering the two 120MM fans because it my opinion it looked tacky otherwise, this can be seen in the above picture. Over the months I had the case I thought of several mods after some careful thinking and planing they have come down to the following.

Modifications
- I always felt the case was a lot like the aesthetics in VALVE's Portal / Portal 2 I wanted this mod to be Portal / Aperture Laboratories themed
- Window mod, large trapezoid mesh cutout for an acrylic window
- maintain a black, blue, white color scheme
- Aperture Labs logo decals placed on the case
- Aperture Labs logos placed inside the case visible from the window
- Aperture Labs fan grills for all fans inside. Made from lasercut acrylic plastic. A grill will also be made for the front 120MM fan.
- 200MM fan housing painted blue for a blue and white combination leaving the blades white
- 120MM fans that are visible to be all black with white Aperture grills
- Revise the cable management significantly, using only blue zipties make use of adaptors in special cases to avoid using modular PSU cables for only one connector.
- Paint the black trim around the the mesh and switches blue with a matte clear finish, this will give my phantom the same look as the Phantom 410 with blue trim
- Convert over to only SATA hard drives, the IDE cable makes cable management difficult and looks tack.
- Convert all blue LEDs to white
- Use white LED ambient lighting instead of colored LEDs to show off the color scheme in the case (thanks mybadomen for giving me the idea in a previous post)
- Ambient Lighting to be made with 12 volt LED strips each controlled by a custom control panel made from a spare bezel and 12 volt automotive rocker switches
with blue LEDs in them indicating on/off
-blue sleeved audio cable extension clean up cable management and make the audio wire look nice



Non Costmetic Upgrades
- Move over to a SATA III SSD for boot drive
- Upgrade graphics card to something newer than GTX 460, right now going for a Sapphire AMD Radeon 7970
- Arctic Cooling Accelero III for the new GPU
- Change from Cooler Master V8 to a Corsair self contained liquid cooling unit, mainly to relieve strain on the motherboard. The radiator will mount on the back
120MM fan spot so weight of the rad will be on the case frame.
- Use the 2 pin 12 volt power cable from the PSU to power the ambient lighting, this way there will be no stray cables
and cable management will be perfect.
- Custom bracket for an 80MM fan to be placed where the small removable drive caddy once was.
- Front bezel card reader (Aperture M)

Things that need to be purchased
- white and blue sleeving for LED strip wiring
- Two pin male and female connectors for LED Strips
- 12X24 .177" solid white Acrylic pastic for fan grills and brackets
- 18 gauge yellow and black wire for ambient LED strip wiring
- Sapphire AMD Radeon 7970
- Arctic Cooling Accelero III
- Corsair Hxx (not sure which one)
- blue and white heatshrink for cable sleeving
- Blue presleaved audio extension cable
- NZXT Aperture M
- PCIe 1x UBS 3.0 card with internal header (for Aperture M)
- NZXT 200MM Fan
- White vinyl Aperture Labs logo decal for power supply

I am hoping to enter this build into Mod of The Month during one of the summer month and I would like to finish it before then so if anyone wants to donate anything on the above list of stuff to get that would be much appreciated!

EDIT:
In the pictures you will see the skateboard I made for my Phantom I spoke of in the owners group. Just forgot to mention that earlier

Here is what I have done so far there is much more to come.


First Mod I did, literally minutes after unboxing.

Edited by stratmaster458 - 6/15/12 at 1:34am

Painting the Trim






Finished Pieces of the Trim






More painting updates:

Top piece of trim is almost there, just need a light sand and a final coat of clear


Repairing / Redoing Finish on the door strip and the control/IO strips



Front Screen


Ambient Lighting and Control panel:

Drilling the bezel: it didn't work out so well so I will be cutting out the section inside the plastic frame and supergluing a piece of laser cut black delrin plastic to hold the switches.



LEDs to convert the 200MM fan to white light, I will be using these LEDs to make all the 120MM white blade NZXT Fans light up, this is so that the blue housing and white blades will be visible through the window and screen.


Switches and power for the ambient lighting. My plan is to utilize the 4 pin Pentium 4 power connector on my power supply so it will no longer have to be tied up behind the mobo tray! Now all the cables that are permantly attached to my semi modular PSU will be in use! The switches are 12 volt automotive switches with blue LEDs to indicate they are on. Not sure if they need a current sink resistor I'll have to test them at my school's lab.


Switch up close


LED strips to be placed around the case and controlled by the switch panel described above.



Apple Extended Keyboard II from 1989 with white ALPS mechanical switches modded to USB from ABD using a Teensy dev board and custom firmware from here: http://geekhack.org/showwiki.php?title=Island:14290
It works flawlessly under Windows 7 but I have had issues with OS X funny enough, it cost me 23 bucks total not bad for a mechanical keyboard.



The keyboard is also part of the mod, I will be modding it with dye and paint to look like the keyboards from Portal:

Edited by stratmaster458 - 7/6/12 at 3:53pm

NEWEST UPDATE 7/17/12: Trim finished and fans finished and installed!

Finished the Trim

















Ambient Lighting Switch panel progress:

Decided that I will just cut out the mesh and laser cut a piece of Delrin with holes for the switches to snap in place. I will superglue the piece of delrin to the modified bezel.
More pictures:



Finished Fans! One is for the back 120MM the 140MM is for the front and the other 120MM is going where the smaller hard drive cage was, a hole will be cut on my skateboard so that air can get in easier. I decided that side fans will replaced with non LED fans that have high airflow and low noise. There is not much to see but harddrives so having LEDs on those fans makes no sense.




Installing the painted fans. I really like how well everything came out.













Edited by stratmaster458 - 7/17/12 at 10:44pm

You have to carefully peel off the sticker then there is a little white clip thing you got to carefully pop that off then after that there is a little black O ring and you need slide it off. After that the blades just slide right out. I covered the coils with painters tape, popes out the LEDs and unraveled the wires taped them together ad cover them in painters tape. Spray painted with plastic bonding spray paint no primer.


Thanks! Met too

I actually am using Image shack, it just seems they aren't showing up the way I would like lolz