Home Build Inspiration - Bengal Rig V3

Cooler Master SL600 Case and Painting

The move from beige boxes to black boxes took place a long time ago now, and since then PC cases have largely been in neutral colours. There is the odd white one, some silver ones, and hundreds of black ones. What if you didn't want a black case, but instead wanted one that you could personalise without too much difficulty? The Cooler Master SL600 is the perfect example of this. It's already an excellent case with plenty of builder friendly features, but what we really love about it is how easy it is to take apart and thus spray without needing to mask off half the world. As you'll have already gathered we're turning our SL600 into an orange beast, and here it is in our local car spray booth. Being "metal and you paint it" car sprayers are perfect for this if you haven't the confidence to do it yourself and we're sure they'll give you a competitive rate as you don't need much paint to cover it all.

Mmm lovely. The Bengal Rig V3 is in a flake orange that looks different depending upon your lighting and environment, just as all fancy paints do. Given that I like a particular shade of orange - none of your peach BS thanks, near safety orange is the way to go, as per the Cincinnati Bengals that are the running theme behind all my PCs.

What really separates this paint job from the standard ones is the use of the CarPro CQUK which forms a ceramic quartz coating when it hardens, which not only gives the finish the protection it needs, but you can buff it to within an inch of its life and it's also hydrophobic. It's a small outlay and a reasonable amount of time, but totally worth it as you'll see in the set of pictures at the bottom of this page. It turns a great finish into a jaw dropping one.

All the ceramic has been finished, and this is the last time the case will be empty. What we think it does highlight is how flexible the SL600 is. Sure you might not want a bright orange case yourself, but you can see how many options there are. You could just paint the fan grill at the bottom, or the front panel, or the feet, or the vertical PSU bracket, or all of these, or none. If, like me, you have a particular hue that rocks your world then we're sure ideas are already forming.

Lastly three pictures which show off the flake effect, and also how insanely shiny the CarPro CQUK coating has made it. We're particular fans of the bottom two pictures which very closely resemble how it looks in the flesh. A deep orange with subtle flaking. *chefs kiss*.

There's more, because of course there is.