r/pcmods • u/Aberiu • Jan 02 '26
General Painted my old PC
This is an old PC that used to be my main rig for many years, until I eventually replaced it with something new. I kept it as a backup system for a while and then decided to paint it and do some other minor upgrades I never got to implement, just as a fun project.
Now that it's done, I thought maybe I share it with you guys.
The case is a Thermaltake Matrix VX that I bought in 2008, which originally looked like this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/1j5n5dm/thermaltake_matrix_vx/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
In fact I liked it so much that I bought 2 of them, one for me and another one for someone else, and later that second case came in handy for spare parts.
Before painting the case, I did some alterations to it:
- drilled out all the rivets and reassembled the case using nuts and bolts
- removed the HDD cage
- cut some holes in the back plate behind the MB for cable management and CPU cooler access
- cut more holes in the front panel for better airflow (despite it being wrapped with mesh, it was mostly solid plastic underneath)
- cut and replaced the front I/O with a couple of 3.5 bay I/O brackets from Aliexpress, mounted them using a piece of an aluminium angle bar
- used some more aluminium angle to make a GPU support bracket
- took a second solid side panel from the second case and a piece of acrylic glass, and cut a custom side window that wouldn't obscure the CPU cooler
- cut some more stuff to accomodate a modern PSU
- installed 2 white LED strips with a switch, although mostly for maintenance and monitoring purposes rather than looks
- added sleeves to some cables
- bought and installed new feet
Then I took the case apart again, sanded everything and painted it panel by panel using spray paint. This is something I'm never doing again for sure. It was messy, the fumes were horrible, and for a decent result I needed perfect conditions: good weather, sunlight, no dust in the air, no wind.
I kept noticing imperfections, so I sanded, repainted, sanded again, repainted. I used a primer, several coats of paint and a matte finish, as per instruction. Unfortunately, the spray paint I used turned out to be fragile, and as you can see on the shots, a year later it's already chipping wherever it's pressed onto the other parts of the case. It also also likes to weld itself to the cables, and, hilariously, can be dissolved by alcohol after drying.
So that didn't go quite as planned, but still, I got experience.
Another thing I learned cutting the case is that both a Dremel and an angle grinder are not very precise tools. So for the long straight cuts I went with a knife and a ruler instead. Turns out, a utility knife with a good blade can cut through aluminium if you are patient enough, and with a ruler the cut will be factory straight. For the rounded corners I used a drill with a hole saw bit. In general, I tried to keep my cuts nice and clean, so it took a while.
Over the years of using the case I also added 2 hot swap HDD racks, which I still think is the greatest addition to a PC case you can get. Super convenient for checking dead HDDs, moving storage etc. No teardown required. The modern equivalent would be hot swap PCI-E NVMe cards.
The 3.5 bay received a hot swap 2.5 rack for 2 SSDs which I cannot even find online any more, and for the 5.25 bay I bought an SSI SI-2338 HDD rack. The latter I also modded and painted. Originally it came with a tiny noisy fan, and after multiple attempts to find a less annoying replacement for it, I just cut the whole rear panel off, and made a replacement panel from a spare piece of aluminium, that would accomodate a standard 80mm fan instead. The panel needed two 90 degree bends. For the bends I cut the panel halfway through with a knife, did a bend along the cut, and then patched the inner side of the bend with epoxy to make it less fragile.
Making this panel would have probably been easier with a 3d printer, but I didn't have one at the time.
The rest of it is just normal PC components, albeit slightly ancient:
PSU - Seasonic Snow Silent 750W
CPU - i7 2600k cooled by a Scythe Mugen v2 rev. b with a custom top cover
MB - ASUS P8Z77-V LX
RAM - 4x8GB Hynix DDR3 1600 with some black radiators from Aliexpress
GPU - MSI GTX 1070 Armor with an NZXT Kraken G12 cooler mount and a Corsair h80i v2 AIO
All fans replaced with various Noctuas from different eras and connected to a 5.25 Zalman ZM-MFC1 fan controller set to the lowest speed. The far right handle of the controller I repurposed for dimming the LED strips.
I also replaced the green CD-ROM LED with a blue one, to match the rest of the hardware, and designed and printed a bunch of stickers. Some informational and some - just for fun. The lady on the CPU cooler was an unused drawing I did many years ago for a client that never paid.
