loren_brothers -
WELCOME TO SPCR!!!
Thanks for you comments of the P160. I'd like to reply to your concerns, using my review sample as a frame of reference.
loren_brothers wrote:The rear I/O shield was so poorly toleranced to the point of my having to do minor sheet metal work on it to get my MB in place on the tray.
The rear I/O shield that came with the case, and the Intel I/O shield that I used for my build both fit nicely into the mobo tray, and the tray/shield/mobo all lined up perfectly on my system.
loren_brothers wrote:The front bezel had several problems with it. The drive bay doors would not allow the drive trays to retract. Upon retraction the trays would get hung up on the tabs on the doors that they were supposed to glide over!
I had no problems with the flip out doors, they worked perfectly every time, although I was a little nervous the first time I used it, as I had never used a case with this type of doors before.
loren_brothers wrote:The thru-buttons on the bezel for the drives and the floppy were not aligned properly (or poorly designed), resulting in frequent incorrect/nonexistant operation.
No problems for me here either. I assume there's no spec for the location on the buttons on an optical drive so maybe yours were in a bit of a different place. Another thought: between your CD tray issue and your button issue, I'm thinking that your bezel isn't mounted correctly and somehow the misalignment is causing both issues.
loren_brothers wrote:The plastic/rubber fan attachments thingies tore in half while trying to install them, so I just replaced them with rubber O-rings between the case and the fan body.
They certainly are delicate, and as I noted in my review, the edges of the holes were sharp enough to shave plastic from cables, so I used care (and my technique of lubricating the barbs with a little soapy water, as described several times in the SPCR forums druing discussions of mounting the EAR fan isolators) and had no problems at all.
loren_brothers wrote:It is my assumption (and that is all it is) that cases were shipped out with front bezels that were of pre-"manufacturing defects" design.
Then I must have got lucky and got a "post-manufacturing defects" review sample.
loren_brothers wrote: As far as the fan goes the review was in remiss: the included fan was Antec's bottom of the line budget model designed to run @ 2000 RPM w/ a 45+ dB level. That is a funny thing to include in an expensive case that is supposed to be "quiet" design? Isn't it?
I don't know what it's rated at and I really don't care, I let my ears and Motherboard monitor make my fan judgements for me. I've found that fan specs aren't a very good indicator of how well a fan actually works, sometimes the manufacturers outright lie, and other times their measuring methods are dubious at best.
As I noted in the review:
"I first tried this fan out at 12 volts and while it wasn't as loud as some 120mm fans that I've heard, it was still too loud for me so I undervolted it to 5 volts. At 5 volts it's pretty darn quiet, and puts out a fairly decent amount of air so I left it.". Even at 5V it's actually louder than the 120mm fans that I run in my own systems, but my own systems are noticeably quieter than the P160 system I built for this review so I was content to leave the stock Antec fan in the case, running at 5V. That fan is still running well to this day, over 4 months since I assembled the system.
loren_brothers wrote:As far as the "humming" referred to in the review: it is my guess is that is just noise/vibration from the low-end fan, which is no longer available for purchase on their web site! Go figure?
The humming that I heard was a composite of all the mechanical noise fron the case fans, PSU fan, CPU fan and HDD vibration that was transmitted throughout the relatively flimsy aluminum chassis. It is found in every aluminum case that I've ever heard, and is not found in halfway decent steel cases. Your humming may have been exacerbated by having to mount the 120mm fan directly to the back wall using O-rings instead of the included isoators. In my experience, those isolators do a much better job of keeping the fan's vibrations from being transmitted into the case than the harder and less compliant O-rings do.