Phanteks Evolv ITX case mod

My friend Joe Fry purchased this small form factor chassis and asked if I wanted to do a themed water-cooled build in it. He didn’t really have a theme in mind and told me to “do whatever I wanted” with it. A $1200 budget was the only real limitation.

The name of the chassis immediately reminded me of one of our favorite games, so I ran with it.

The case was a great example of small form factor, but as such, had nearly no room for water cooling. I had to keep it simple, but also capable of cooling a 105W processor and a Radeon Vega64 in a very small space. I bent up some .063" Aluminum plate to fabricate a simple pump mount and cut some frames for the two radiators that also doubled as light fixtures. With fittings and tubing added that pretty much filled the available space, so the fans and reservoir had to be “externally” mounted. lots of other detail parts were made, many of which were painted fire engine red to match the interior of the chassis.

The top of the case needed to have a very precise cutout for the reservoir, so the waterjet at CG&P in Joplin did the job far more nicely than I could with a Dremel. The top also needed some airflow holes, since the fans were now nearly touching it, so I decided to do the three chevrons from the game’s monster upgrade status. (Three being a fully evolved monster.)

The faceplate of the case was now also blocking airflow and had to be removed entirely. It needed a big hole cut in it- but it couldn’t look like the big ugly vent it functioned as. This was my favorite part of the build. The splash screen of the game was a giant footprint in half-dried lava- which was perfect for what it needed. I got to work fabricating a replacement out of a couple layers of plastic. The first being acrylic so that it could be edge lit to resemble the lava glow. The second is a layer of ABS to represent the dried cracked surface. These were hand drawn and cut by bandsaw. The ABS parts were too shiny, so I scorched them with a butane torch to get a blistered crusty surface that resembled lava quite nicely. The acrylic was glued to the ABS parts and sanded to diffuse the lighting of some tiny individual red LEDs I hid behind them.

The logo plates were the first time I ever used a 3D printer. I used clear filament so that it could be backlit. The lettering was made taller than the surface so that I could paint the whole thing with black to mask it and simply sand through where I wanted light to penetrate.