I do realize this is meant to be a pictures thread, but I just thought I'd mention this here:
I'm still on the hunt for the "Perfect Dream" ITX high-end gaming SFF case. I HAD a contact with one company (who basically only exist in the European and Asian markets, they have almost no products in North America) who actually seemed receptive to considering designing a variant of one of their existing cases. Well, that guy stopped responding suddenly a year or so ago when they wanted Lots of credit for basically no meaningful design ideas, all of which were already in mine. I was going to give them credit and mention them by name regardless, but once I mentioned possibly making a YT video on the subject, they immediately stonewalled me.
So I guess I'm back on the hunt? I've got three of their cases, one of which is dam near close to perfect IMO and will be the case I use when I eventually catch up on my projects and FINALLY upgrade my main gamer... to a 5900x

. Yep, parts sitting on a shelf for almost 2 years now I think, thank you flood+covid+medical @#$%. I'll likely be able to use the other two cases as well: one of which could be, IMO, a near-perfect APU build case (if I ever actually build an APu gamer system). And the last/third one was to be the basis off which I wanted to make design changes to make into the true, "Perfect Dream" ITX gamer case.
Sadly, since being cut off by that one employee, I haven't been able to re-establish contact with that company at all. So right now my only real option to build the case would be a company called Protocase. I don't think I've seen anyone here ever mention them, and they primarily do custom sheet metal stampings and similar. They do offer full prototype 1-off case builds though, but 1) I doubt I could afford it and 2) I seriously question if my design wouldn't just be completely stolen instantly by such a company, were I to fully model it in a CAD program then send it to them for a quote (need to do a LOT of legal -type research to see who retains ownership of the design, stuff like that, but I've basically got No experience with those topics).
Anyways, for the short-term: the first project I'll probably make a build log for and post the final pictures of here would be my most urgent build: rebuilding my file server, my "collection". Antec 1200 full transplant into a Coolermaster Cosmos S case. Not exactly ground-breaking, but that system needs Lots of love... once I fix some issues... but AFTER I make a full disaster recovery backup of all my data onto external drives. Yeah... living in Quebec and with completely unreliable power network, I'm waiting at least another month or so before attempting the many many hours of slow USB3.0 mirroring it'll take to make that disaster recovery. Bleh. Even with my expensive sine-wave 1500va UPS I'm afraid to start the process and lose power (it's literally happened during calm, sunny days - thank you HydroQuebec).
As per usual, I've made a massive wall of text that most won't read. Oh well. Sorry to dump my brain out a bit. Ttyl HWC

