In Win Mod in Taiwan – Day 1 Summary

The space In Win has set up for the competition is, frankly, awesome. It's essentially a giant man-cave, with massive work benches and loads of equipment. The case the teams are working with is the In Win 509; either the standard black and silver version or the special Asus ROG version in black and red. They also have all the hardware needed for a high-end, water-cooled X99 build, including Asus Strix graphics cards and a variety of LGA2011-v3 boards such as the Sabertooth, and new Deluxe II and Strix models.

Watercooling components are provided by EKWB, with modders using pumps, radiators, reservoirs and waterblocks plus various components by Bitspower too. Naturally, there is also lots and lots of Red Bull.


Anyone who has ever modded will know that an entire case mod in just 24 hours is no easy task, even when you have two sets of hands on deck. Nevertheless, they're all wholeheartedly embracing the challenge. As soon as the clock started ticking, cases were stripped and sparks were flying.


Day 1 was mostly a day for nailing down design ideas, stripping cases in preparation for painting and taking care of nitty gritty work like cable braiding, sanding and cutting. We were particularly drawn to Team Down Under's external radiator construction formed from three 360mm radiators – this will eventually be turned into a military-style detatchable rucksack that can provide extra cooling for overclocking sessions, with an additional radiator inside the case handling normal use.


At the end of the day, lots of progress had been made by all teams but the builds won't start to truly come together until day two, which is underway as we posted this so make sure you stay tuned for coverage of the final two days and 16 hours of modding.