nothingtoseehere

Project - Gaming PC Build in a Sun Ultra 24 Case

Why?

I really like the style of these cases which date back to around 2007. They have great airflow through the giant front grille and are ATX compatible which makes for a relatively easy build.

Sourcing a near-20 year old case

I was able to purchase my ‘bare’ case from Clyde Computers. It arrived in great condition…

Note that as a ‘bare’ case it’s missing the front I/O panel. More on that later. Inside, the case was empty but did retain a hard drive cage.

Readying the interior

Removing this cage did require me to drill out a number of rivets. This took a while but once I found the right HSS drillbit it was pretty straightforward. Note the use of masking tape to avoid scratching the paint during the process.

The build

I started by fitting some fans. After some measuring I went with:

Noctua NF-A14x25 G2 PWM - 140mm intake for the front of the case
Noctua NF-A9 PWM - 92mm intake, also for the front of the case
Noctua NF-A12x25 G2 PWM - 120mm exhaust for the rear, along with…
Corsair HXi Series HX1000i - power supply and other exhaust

The original Sun Ultra 24 (as far as I can tell) shipped with a black DVD drive which doesn’t quite fit with the aesthetic but in the interests of ‘originality’ I sourced a used drive from eBay. I was keen to get one that was plain black with no white text on it to achieve the original look.

Jainux - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

After that, I built up the motherboard and did a test fit. All of the mounting points aligned but there were a couple of rubber mounts which I had to remove for the board to fit flat.

Finishing up

The case didn’t come with motherboard screws and so I had to source those separately. Then I could install the motherboard, GPU and connect the requisite cables. I ended up with this and it POSTed without any issues.

I went for:

Asus GeForce RTX 5080 Prime OC 16GB Graphics Card
AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D Eight Core 5.20GHz Processor
G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo EXPO (2x16GB) DDR5 6000MHz Dual Channel memory
Crucial T705 1TB NVMe PCIe M.2 Solid State Drive
Asus PRIME X870-P DDR5 ATX Motherboard
Noctua NH-D15 G2 LBC Dual Tower CPU Cooler

The next challenge was the lack of the I/O panel. Unfortunately this also houses the power button as well as firewire and USB sockets. If I had it there are pin-outs online which allow it to be used. However without it I added some microswitches for power and reset buttons along with some LEDs and had them exit a Firewire port as a short-term solution.

I plan to 3D print a new front-panel to make the power button, USB-A sockets and LEDs work as they should and to add USB-C to the firewire slots.

Next steps

To complete the build I need to:

Do some internal cable management, the USB interface for the PSU is too short and looks very untidy. That said it may not really be needed.
Make the IO panel
Paint the front fans black as the famous Noctua colours are quite visible through the mesh
Consider adding some kind of dust filtering as the case doesn’t have any

Conclusion

This project was pretty straightforward and I achieved the look I was going for.