Ok, here's the rundown:

What's Changing:

• The fans are all replaced. The CoolerTec fans are all gone, as is the rear Cooler Master Sickleflow PWM - The front fan is now a MasterFan Pro Air Pressure 140 pulled from the PinkEye Revenger, the pair of top fans are now ThermalTake Riing 140 blues, and the rear fan is a Generic DC 120mm (owing to the lack of fan headers on the selected replacement motherboard, and many of the headers are not PWM). There will also be a drive bay cooler (Evercool HK-3F-BK) because I only need 4 bays and the case has 5 bays, but the extra bay covers for this case has all inexplicably went missing except for one, which appears to have partially disintegrated under mysterious circumstances.
  
  
  
• The FrontX drive bay panel is going away, as I never liked my jury-rigged front panel USB 3 ports, and there were no official USB 3 ports from FrontX, and the RS-232 port needs rewiring because it was wired for Asus motherboards, as Asus motherboard has an unusual RS-232 pinout compared to the standard pinouts used by other motherboard manufacturers. It will be replaced by a cheap generic front panel with just a pair of USB3 and USB2 ports- they're in the mail and should be here any day now.
  
• The Blu-Ray drive will be replaced by a second Lite-On DVD writer. I really wanted to keep the Blu-Ray drive, but then I dropped it and smashed up the face plate due to clumsiness from lack of sleep. Oops.
  
  
  
• The PSU is now a Cooler Master Silent Pro M 850w Bronze yanked from an older build. I don't trust the AcBel R9 since I asked my dad to take it in to check why it was producing a loud hissing noise when under load and he found nothing wrong with it. The 850w is inferior but in our use case, it should be good enough.
  
  
  
• The motherboard. The Asus Sabertooth 990FX R2 developed a fault (One of the USB 3 header pin broke- Military Grade Tough my posterior). I agree with Reddit that the person who designed the USB3 header should be tarred and feathered. Aside from that, I soon discovered that Asus region codes their motherboards and those sold in Malaysia are inferior- the version of the Sabertooth 990FX R2 sold in first world countries like the US, UK, Australia and Singapore supported PCIe 3 thanks to an additional translator chip. The version sold in second world countries like Malaysia doesn't and only runs the PCIe slots at 2.0 speed. Not as bad as the version sold in third world countries like India that doesn't even support USB3 tho. But yeah, I'm not up for this bullshit Asus pulled. In it's place will be a Gigabyte GA-990FX-Gaming that I bought refurbished.
  
  
  
• SATA SSDs to be swapped out for proper NVMe SSDs. The nice thing about the GA-990FX-Gaming is that it has one NVMe four lane slot. Although it only runs at PCIe 2 speeds, that is still four times faster than SATA SSDs. However, I only still have 256GB sticks in stock, and that is hardly enough by 2021 standards. Planning to get a budget 512GB stick once my next paycheck lands, I already have a budget NVMe stick in my sights.
  
• One of the leftover 256GB sticks I have will be put into a four-lane PCIe to NVMe adapter and used for caching the RAID array, thanks to my one more PrimoCache license that I've left languishing since I scrapped the previous incarnation of this machine.
  

What's staying the same:

• The SoundBlaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty edition. That sound card requires a case with a drive bay to fully shine. And of course the DragonLord has 5 drive bays.
  
• The fleet of four WD Blue 500GB SATA3 drives. They'll provide me with 1.5TB of storage at RAID-5. They won't be as fast as NVMe, but I have a workaround planned via a caching NVMe drive, as noted above.
  
• The first Lite-On DVD writer stays.
  
• The AMD FX-8320E is returning, along with the heavy duty 105w TDP cooler that's meant for Phenom II 1000-series hex-core CPUs. Given that the FX-8320E runs at 65W TDP at default settings, I expect results just as good as before.
  
  
  
• 4 sticks of Kingston HyperX 1866MHz DDR3 RAM, giving us 16GB total. Enough for lighter games and overkill for the machine's intended purpose- burninating and ripping DVDs.
  
  
  
• Two of the RX 470 GPUs are returning. Not planning to go three-way again, it was unnecessary since the third card cannot be allocated to Physics processing, plus even two cards still don't have enough grunt to handle Quake Champions. I'll save the third card for the NAS build that is still planned to happen before Ryzen 3400G CPUs disappear from the market.
  

Additional thoughts:

• I initially wanted to pull my two GeForce 650Ti Boosts out of storage and put them back into commission. But since NVidia announced that they are dropping support for the cards very soon, GG, plan yeeted, will use RX470s instead.
  
• No, the case is so old it doesn't have USB 3 ports.
  

I said I may change the name of the project, and today I do what I promised.

The project is now known as the Azure Revenger.

The reason being that, well, with the red fans removed and the top fans being changed to Riing 140 Blue LED fans (taken from the Thermaltake Core X71TG that was used for the Red Dead Re:Birth project because the motherboard of that project needs PWM fans, and put into this project because the motherboard for this doesn’t support PWM fans), the lighting in the machine is now practically all blue in color. Additionally, the rear 12cm DC fan has once again been removed (need it for an emergency fix-up of my gateway firewall server whose DC fan failed). When I hit up Lazada (a local online marketplace website) for replacements the first thing that caught my eye was one that lights up in a brilliant blue color, which I think will complement the two Riing fans very nicely.

And lastly, well, I’ve been streaming The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III lately. Go figure. Not that I like Crow tho.

Tried to complete the build yesterday. Went about as well as walking in tar.

First, the cable of the front panel of the soundblaster broke. Ok, got my dad to help. Nothing a soldering gun, extra telephone cable and electrical tape won't fix.

Then the molex connector for the Evercool drive bay fan decides to bend. Went through hell to fix that.

Then I discovered that the USB back plate was faulty. Ok, some elbow grease and quick swaperoo with connectors that have lost their back plate for some reason fixed that.

Then I accidentally broke the clip of one of the SATA cables. No big deal. I have tons of spare SATA cables at this point. Decided to swap out two so it looks uniform.

Lastly, I accidentally mauled the molex connector for the DC fan. Luckily it was still fixable.

Later at night, I decided that the machine is now in a bootable state (nevermind I still haven't plugged in the RGB controller because the Y-splitter was still not here yet). Despite the lack of RGB, the machine's insides was bathed in a brilliant shade of azure.

Forgot to mention: the front fan is now a CoolerMaster MasterFan Pro 140 Air Pressure RGB. So I can see that power is on without standing up as the power LED of this case is on the top (I had not realized how bright the rear DC azure fans are at that point). Also, the CPU cooler is now the CoolerMaster MasterAir G200P meant for the Rainbow Warrior build before I read reviews that it couldn’t handle the 105w TDP of the 3950X and decided to just wing it with water cooling, despite some sites citing CoolerMaster claiming 135w TDP support. For those wondering if the FX CPU would cope: yes, since the E in the CPU model number denotes the low power variant of the CPU (65w), trading off some clock speed for cooler running. The G200P is rated for 95w CPUs, with CoolerMaster claiming 135w TDP support under ideal conditions (no doubt some unachievable-in-Malaysia environment, like a fully air-conditioned server room kept at below 16 degrees Celsius, or Taiwanese winter). Even if it won’t let the CPU boost as much as the 105w Phenom II 10xx coolers can, 95w is still generous enough of an boosting overhead. Especially since the workload of this machine is now pretty much DVD ripping. The G200P also has an RGB fan, and comes with that discreet controller- why the Y cable is important.

Anyways, the machine boots. Everything checks out as it should.

So Today the RGB Y-cable finally arrives. I wasted no time in installing the RGB controller and getting them connected to the fans. Except that it only came with one male-to-male adapter when I need two. I thought I had to wait some more, but Luckily I managed to find one male-to-male adapter from a bag of stuff and wasted no time getting that plugged in.

I'm now closing the case (pun not intended). The project is completed.

Now I need to figure out how to archive DVDs from Linux. Because screw Microsoft for imposing a forced requirement for Zen+ or Coffee Lake CPU along with mandatory TPM and secure boot for Windows 11.