AMBER X1

My daily driver
Back in 2016…

The Thermaltake Core X1 was marketed as an ITX chassis, but was quite large to accomodate full size graphics cards and lots of radiators. The motherboard sat flat in the middle of the chassis atop a full ATX power supply. It was an awkward layout that had lots of wasted space in my opinion.

So I fixed it…

I drilled out all the rivets and started re-engineering.

I discovered that a full ATX motherboard would fit nicely in the conventional orientation- if the power supply was at the front. So I chopped up some old case parts and welded them together to make a motherboard tray and mount for the power supply. I’m not a skilled welder, so while it was still quite ugly, textured paint hid most of my poor joints- until 8 years later I got sick of seeing it and built a proper one from sheet metal.

At the time I had a pair of Sapphire R9 290X cards and wanted to showcase them pretty-side-up, so I flipped the chassis and built a new floor plate for what was once the top. (That, too, was quite ugly and replaced later on.)

Some edge-lit acrylic between a couple wooden wheels from Hobby Lobby made decent feet. Surface-mount 2mm amber LEDs had to be glued in and wired together to fit inside each foot. I had ordered way too many LEDs, so I decided to add some more edge-lit acrylic to the faceplate to tie the feet into the theme. A 180mm Enermax Apollish fan sits front and center. It got disassembled so I could swap out the red LEDs with more of the tiny amber ones I still had too many of.

Several firsts

• This was my first attempt at cable sleeving. I used Golden Yellow paracord since it matched the color of the graphics cards perfectly.

• It was my first hardline water cooling loop. I was instantly hooked on tubing bends, even though I had to painstakingly mix yellow and orange coolant to match the school-bus yellow hue that was becoming thematic.

• It was also the first time I won a case modding contest. Netwar 32 in Omaha Nebraska. Pictures of the mod appeared in the now-defunct CPU Magazine.

This has been my primary rig since 2016, and was only recently rebuilt in 2024 to hold a Ryzen CPU and monster RX7900XTX card. The new card was also a Sapphire brand, so I cut the nameplate from one of the old cards and integrated it into the water block as a tribute.