Custom & OEM Cases - It's not that difficult or expensive

Published by Richard Parry on 24th Jul 2013

Sometimes a choice of 500 cases is just not enough.

The discerning customer is always after something slightly different, perhaps your special requirement is as simple as wanting your cases painted royal blue, red, green or even pink, ok we can arrange that, its as simple as diverting a batch of standard cases from the paint line and getting them painted in your Company Livery, however more often than not you require a structural change in a standard case or even a completely bespoke case or case set.

OEM comes in a variety of degrees of modification or design: -

Minor changes: You may say to us. “I want it just like the SC-1250 but without the front USB’s” or I want it “exactly like the SC-23650 but without the lower 5.25 external drive bay”. This type of OEM modification is minor, it only requires a slight change in the case front bezel, we would require minimum orders of 50 to make these changes.

You may want one of our standard cases like an SC-215 but due to environmental or internal thermal loading a standard set of fans (designed as a compromise between CFM airflow and dBa) is deemed unsatisfactory and you require 4 x 50CFM fans (and you want them hot swap) in the centre fan wall instead of the standard fixed units, this is again minor and a minimum order of 50 will enable this change to be made.

As can be seen a small bezel change plus a fan change and “can I have a 500W 80 PLUS PSU pre fitted” are all in the minor changes category.

Major changes: We oftern have customers who need a slightly more radical re-design on one of our cases, typically “The SC-1304 is exactly what we want but we only need to fit a mini ITX mother board and it can only be 500mm long”.

We can make this type of OEM change fairly easily, we have to make structural changes to the case shell which is more work of course, we would therefore require a larger commitment from you and would require a minimum order quantity of 100 cases. We could schedule these to meet your requirements, an order for 200 supplied 50 per month would be a typically acceptable supply solution.

Bespoke case (based on a starting point): You may want to take a 4U case like our SC-43400 which at 400mm deep is already fairly shallow but need it only 350mm deep to fit into your bespoke cabinet (which is already being made for you elsewhere). You still need 6 x 3.5” drives and 2 x 5.25” drives and you have a full size bespoke PCI/RAID card you have to fit in.

Now we have a set of problems requiring a bespoke solution, an optical drive and an ATX PSU complete with its multitude of wires simply will not fit in the 350mm you require. This time we need to think more radically.

How about if we switched from an ATX PSU and fitted a 1U PSU (that fit under the 2 existing 5.25” drive bays) you still have the 2 x 5.25” bays you needed. We would need to manufacture a bespoke back plate but that’s ok we can do that, (See example below).

We would also need to design in a horizontal PCI rear aperture because there is not enough room to fit in the PCI/RAID card (standing vertically) and still offer you the 6 x 3.5” drive bays you need, what we can do is fit the card under the 6 x 3.5” drive carrier trays, that’s ok we can do that as well.

Once we have sorted out your case requirements we can look at our build and global warranty services. Do you need it CE marked as a system, you guessed it, we can do that for you as well.

Providing there is a customer out there that needs something special or different we will keep on providing this niche service, to put it into perspective today is the 23rd of July, already this month we have provided 2 x new OEM customers with bespoke case solutions.

Some more examples of OEM customisation;