by Vasily Melnik
04/06/2006 | 08:07 PM
ASUS hasn’t been long on the market of PC cases, yet it has already established itself in the middle sector of it. A familiar brand and a rather good design of ASUS’s system cases have made them quite popular. This is not to say that the company considers this market as a priority: the model range mostly consists of midrange products and is not as comprehensive as what is offered by the industry majors.
Moreover, ASUS seems to target just the loyal fans of its brand, so its system cases are in fact niche products. Rather strange to have this from ASUS since other companies usually try to address their fans with top-end rather than midrange offerings.
But why does ASUS do so? You may remember the Vento system case that used to raise much excitement among the brand’s admirers as well as among all beauty-loving people. Most of them, however, were left disappointed after learning more about that product: a most improperly designed side panel, a cramped interior despite large dimensions, and a unique decorative panel that concealed the front bays and would fly up high at any touch.
Roughly speaking, ASUS’s engineers took it very easy and just designed a plastic outside for an ordinary midrange system case with all the consequences. The resulting product was comparable to such brands as Lian-Li in price, but far inferior to them in quality and characteristics. ASUS never tried to experiment like that anymore, but focused on production of midrange cases, and this is in fact what the company’s current model range is like: mainstream PC cases priced a little higher than others because they sport an ASUS logo.
Well, some users may argue my point, but my goal is to show you how appealing ASUS’s current PC cases are for an ordinary PC user. Three models are going to be presented to you today, two of them belonging to the middle class and one with some pretension to originality.
All recent system cases from ASUS come in rather plain-looking packages:
But the contents of the package may be surprising at times. The TA-370 is an example of that:
This is something, I should tell you. You can rather expect to see something like that at a modern arts exhibition than to have it for your own use as a PC system case. The front panel is designed in a most peculiar way:
The panel is wavy and is also like a volumetric chessboard. Most people who’ve seen this system case asked me one question, “Is it a case for a chess player’s computer?” Well, tastes differ, but I don’t think too many people are going to be fond of such an uncommon design. Let’s put aside the aesthetics factor, though, and get to worldly things like functionality.
In order not to impair the visual uniformity of the front panel, the developers put decorative faceplates into the top pair of 5.25” bays.
The disc eject buttons are camouflaged rather too well, and you may find it difficult to hit them in the evening in a dimly lit room. Moreover, the buttons are placed right on the flip-down faceplates and you cannot press one when the disc tray is open. This is not good because some optical drives – even from ASUS itself – do not take kindly to unceremonious treatment and successfully resist your trying to close the tray by pushing it back. The other two 5.25” bays are covered with ordinary brackets, so the designers’ attempts at uniformity are going to prove fruitless if you need to install something else besides two optical drives. The two external 3.5” bays are hidden under a flip-down cover:
This cover is handy enough. You just have to press anywhere on its top to open it up.
On the left of the 3.5” bays there are Power and Reset buttons, and a LED indicator of hard drive activity.
The Power-On indicator is built right into the button and shines with a soft unobtrusive light at work. A few interface connectors are at the bottom of the case under a flip-down panel:
I was rather taken aback at finding no FireWire port here.
The designers have managed to carve out vent openings without violating the uniform design of the front panel:
The rear panel is ordinary enough:
There’s nothing particularly interesting here. And here’s the side panel:
Besides a stamped company logo and two vents opposite the CPU and graphics card, there is a turning handle of the door lock here:
The lock is designed in almost the same way as in the Vento model.
Following the recent trend among system case manufacturers, there is a CPU air-duct at the top vent opening:
The vent opening is rather wide, so you can adjust the air-duct position horizontally to adapt it perfectly to your particular mainboard model. There is no dust filter in the air-duct, which is not surprising considering the number of other vent openings. One filter just wouldn’t make any difference.
The interior of this system case looks rather modest:
Not much here for a case of that price category. A pleasant trifle, a 120mm mm exhaust fan is preinstalled on the rear panel.
There is only one cage for hard disk drives and it can accommodate a couple of devices at best.
It’s not good to have two drives so near one another in a cage that lacks air cooling (there are seats for two 60mm fans in the front panel, but it looks more like a scoff to me). The fact that the drives are fastened via vibration-suppressing spacers doesn’t help much. So, the TA-370 can accommodate normally only one hard drive in its cage. I really don’t know what the developers thought about, considering the class and price category of the case. The cage is removable to make it easy to install an optical drive.
Hard drives are fixed with special screws:
These screws cannot crush the rubber spacers, which is good. The installed drive sticks rather far out of the cage, so you may want to install the mainboard first.
It’s simpler with the optical drives, which are fixed in place with two spring-loaded latches:
You open them up to install a drive:
Then put the drive in and close the latches:
The only drawback of this solution is that the latch serves two bays at once.
One more drawback was found later:
If you use a standard graphics card with a larger cooler or just a long graphics card as are abundant nowadays, there is almost no space left to attach power and interface cables to the hard drive as well as to connect additional power to the graphics card.
The problem can be solved by moving the hard drive higher up the screw-holes, but there are no anti-vibration pads there. So, I just reinstalled the drive into the top bay:
This just shows once again that this system case can normally accommodate only one hard disk drive if your configuration is above average.
I also have one complaint about the screw-less fastening of the expansion cards:
I could only close one lock with the dual-slot graphics card I used in my tests. The other lock just closed down on the card’s PCB exactly with the part the arrow is pointing at:
Here’s the assembled system:
And I found one more fault with the system case here:
There’s hardly any space left between the cooler’s heatsink and the power supply. It means such coolers as, for instance, Zalman’s 7700 series wouldn’t not just fit in with this mainboard. Even entry-level, cheap system cases today provide some space between the mainboard and the PSU, so here’s one point more against the TA-370.
My verdict is not in favor of this product. The TA-370 leaves an odd impression as it is as big as a regular system case of that category, but its interior is rather cramped. Added the questionable design, I am really not sure about the user this model is targeted at. Well, chess players who are going to build a midrange computer out of standard parts should like this one, I guess.
The case is shipped in the same packaging as the previous model:
The contents are absolutely different, though:
This time it is a classically designed system case without much pretension to originality, yet quite cute-looking. I’m all in favor of the junior model if I were to compare it with the TA-370. The front panel of the TA-252 is in fact the example of how the front panel of a PC case should be shaped:
The single drawback is the “legacy” slit for a floppy drive – I don’t think you need one in a home computer. What’s good about the front panel is the well-placed Power-On button…
…and the big vent grid with the company logo:
The grid is not just a decoration:
You see there is a vent opening behind it and a seat for an 80mm fan which should blow through the cage with the drives (not included with the case, unfortunately).
As opposed to the TA-370, there is a full selection of interface connectors here:
These are not concealed from view, but are anyway quite properly placed on the front panel.
The side panel brings no surprises:
You can read the name of the manufacturer again and see two vents here. The rear panel is designed in a traditional manner, too:
There are two seats for 80mm fans instead of one seat for a 120mm fan here.
The internal design of the case is up to its class.
You don’t have any conveniences like removable cages or thumbscrew fastenings here. Even the brackets in the front panel are to be just torn off.
There’s no use in my describing the assembly procedure for such a typical system case. Just grasp your screwdriver and get going. And I will move on right to the final result:
I had only one hitch here. It was when I was installing the drives:
Only one of the cooled bays was available for me with my configuration – the topmost one. Moreover, you should only install the drives after you’ve installed the mainboard. You are going to have some serious difficulties if you do this in the reverse order. Not that it is much of a drawback, considering the class of the product. What’s interesting, this case is inferior to the TA-370 in dimensions and class, but it does permit to install large coolers, providing that 1cm-wide gap between the mainboard and the power supply.
As a result, the TA-252 is a good system case you can build an inexpensive good home computer in, if you take care to equip it with a quiet power supply and quiet system fans.
The TA-212 is in fact a twin brother of the TA-252 model. They have the same chassis but different front panels:
Like in the TA-252, the two top bays are covered by flip-down panels:
And the panels are somewhat handier than those in the TA-212:
The disc eject button remains accessible irrespective of the position of the tray. The 3.5” bays are hidden under a movable shutter:
The shutter isn’t designed too well. It gets stuck constantly, so you’d better consider the TA-252 if you are regularly accessing these bays. The Reset button is placed next to them, but you can only press it with something thin and sharp. The Power-On button is at the bottom of the panel, a little above the panel that conceals the group of frontal interface connectors.
It is the same set of connectors as the TA-252 offers:
The Power-On button is highlighted from two sides with Power and HDD Activity indicators via a special reflector:
That’s all the difference. Subjectively, the TA-212 is somewhat worse from the standpoint of ergonomics than the TS-252, but if you like its design, you may well put up with the ergonomics. Another important difference is that the TA-212 lacks vent openings in the front panel. The intake fan gets all of its air through the narrow slit at the bottom of the front panel; your hard drives may not like it.
So, I’ve given you the descriptions of the system cases and now I am going to check them in action.
I tested the system cases as they were, i.e. without changing the default speed of the preinstalled system fans. The tests were performed in a closed and fully assembled case and at a constant ambient temperature maintained by an air conditioner. I also took care to lay out the cables and wires in such a way that they didn’t hinder free circulation of air inside the case.
The following system was assembled in the tested PC cases:
There were four test modes:
The temperatures of the CPU and mainboard were read with Intel Desktop Utilities version 2.1 which are supplied with the mainboard. The GPU and graphics card temperatures were read with RivaTuner. The HDD temperature was reported by HDD Thermometer. The temperatures were read only after they had fully stabilized. The ambient temperature remained constant at 20°C throughout the tests.
As for the noise factor, I’ll give you my subjective opinion about the noisiness of the preinstalled system fans below. We received the cases without power supplies, so there was nothing else in them to produce noise.
Idle Mode:
CPU Burn Mode:
Gaming Mode:
HDD Burn Mode:
The cases both do well for their class. As you may have noticed, I didn’t test the TA-212 because it has the same chassis as the TA-252 while the different front panel may only affect the cooling of the hard drives.
The low-speed exhaust fan of the TA-370 was very quiet at work. The TA-252/TA-212, on the contrary, has a rather noisy fan with an obviously redundant performance, so you may want to reduce its voltage to lower the noise to acceptable level.
So, the TA-252 and TA-212 system cases suit well for building a midrange computer, but you should look elsewhere if you’re assembling a top-end machine. It’s not so definite with the TA-370. It seems to belong to the lower segment of the top price category, but even putting aside the questionable exterior design, this model has nothing to do among top-end PC cases. It is too cramped inside and offers lame functionality.
Thus, the TA-252 seems to be the only one of the reviewed cases to be worthy of your attention. It features a classical design and is potentially suitable to ensure a quiet and efficient cooling of the components; you are going to spend no more than $55-60 to get this system case and a 360W power supply. If you are an admirer of the brand and are not into any kind of experiment, consider that one. But if you don’t care about the brand, there are a lot of exciting alternatives in a range of $55-70.