X-bit labs

Workstation Cases Roundup: Best Power Characteristics, Best Cooling, Best Design! (page 10)

Category: Other

by Yury Vayukin

[ 01/14/2005 | 04:27 PM ]

You can pack as many as four external 5.25” devices and two floppy drives into this case. They are fastened from one side only, with the enclosed screws.

You can have up to five hard disk drives in this case. They are all installed into the rack perpendicularly to the case and are mounted in metal rails. The rails themselves are screwed up to the drive with special low-head screws. There’s a minor inconvenience – you have to put the drive on its side to screw a rail up, and you may find it difficult to screw the second rail.

There are traditional seven slits for the expansion cards in the rear panel. The case comes with the slits open – you can close some of them with the enclosed brackets. Here’s another trifle, this time a pleasant one – there are depressions in the side rear stiffening rib opposite to each slit that make it easy to screw the brackets up. Plastic guides for full-size cards are positioned against the top four slits.

To install the mainboard, you first have to remove the metal beam that serves as a stiffness rib as well as a guide for the plastic clips of the expansion cards. Then you put in the threaded pegs and mount the mainboard on them.

I should confess this system case took me the longest time to assemble the testbed. Besides the problems with the rails and the mainboard installation, there’s a problem with the power cables. The power cables of the employed PowerMan IW-ISP300A2-0 PSU are just too short: a 25cm cable, a 40cm cable (with the first Molex plug found at 25cm), and 50cm (35cm to the first plug). And the distance to the topmost drive in the basket is 45cm, to the lowest drive – 55cm! So I could only use the standard cable to attach the CD-ROM, the floppy drive and the top hard disk drive. Other devices were powered through splitter cables.

A 120mm fan at the rear panel of the case is ventilating this case. Its rotation speed is 2500rpm; its blades are protected with a metal grid. I found no other seats for system fans, although the manufacturer’s website claims an opportunity of installing two additional 80mm fans on the front panel.

Numerous vent holes in the front panel of the case and one big round hole in the left panel ensure passive ventilation of the computer.

Here are the results of my tests:

This case can hardly serve as a file server. This situation may change if a new modification of this case comes with a fan on the front or side panel – especially to cool the hard disk drives.