I have previously water cooled my windowed Ncase M1 with a 240 rad + 92 rad, mainly for fun because I knew the cooling wouldn’t be fantastic.

But now I’m ready to tackle to cooling aspect of it to make it quieter. And my solution is to extend it to make it taller!

I had planned this for nearly a year, but seeing Maniac’s tophat mod really kicked me into gear.

The extension is ~60mm on the top to fit a 30mm thick 240 rad and two 120x25mm fans, with help of some 3D printed parts.

This is how the current prototype looks –

First I cut the original fan bracket to allow the tubes to go through. I also drilled a couple of holes – one for an M3 screw to secure the bracket to the rear of the case (as there’s already an M3 tapped hole there), and one for a cable tie to secure it to the front. If anyone has a better suggestion than cable tie please let me know!

I 3D printed some “legs” that fit to the top cover for extension. They use the original mounting pins and are surprisingly secure, but I will probably print bigger ones so that I can use tapes in addition for extra security.

A closer look at the “legs”.

And this is how the stack looks with rad and fans. Using 2 old Noctua Redux fans for now because the newer A12x25 is out of stock.

The stack with tubes on the case. It’s not secured yet because it’s waiting to be filled. In the mean time I also replaced the bottom rad with an XSPC thin one and Noctua A12x15 fans, and that gave me soooo much more space. Highly recommended!

Using soft tubes, I can just push the stack aside for maintenance.

Top cover fitted using original fitting points.

Acrylic panels on. Smokey grey colour. They are the OptimumTech designed panels & 3D printed brackets, but with 60mm added to the top, for both sides. The right side has cutouts for the PSU fan. The front top fascia is 3D printed and temporary only. I do have a better plan for to make it look seamless!

And this is the rear. With an open hole. The bottom & rear fans are intake. The top fans have to be exhaust so they don’t fight against the PSU fan.

With RGB.

So this is my current progress. It is not finished yet. But the temperatures and hence the noise are already amazing compared to before!

It’s around 15-20C lower than before on the same fan curve running Heaven 🙂

The tube run is not as good as I had imagined though. I wanted an organic look and ended up with kind of a messy look.