First, a big thanks to Mike and everyone else at SPCR for a great site. I learned a lot here, and it helped me put together a really nice little general-purpose PC.

Most of the components I used are familiar to everyone here, but I thought you might like to see how they work in the IN WIN Mt. Jade case.

Here's what it looks like:





We needed a new PC for general family use, including some video editing and moderate gaming. Priorities were: cheap, fairly quiet, and small in that order. I also want it to be useful as a HTPC/media-extender when it gets too old/slow for gaming and general use.

A mATX 780G MB, low-power Athlon X2, and low-end HD 4xxx card are perfect for this. I chose:

IN WIN Mt. Jade case (aka BK623)
ASUS M3A78-EM 780G motherboard
Athlon X2 4850e 2.5GHz 45W CPU
4 GB DDR2 800 RAM
Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 card
WD Caviar Green 640GB drive
LG DVD drive
Vista 32-bit

Overall, it worked out great. Total cost was about $575 shipped, including Vista.

Despite the case's size, ventilation, and power limits, it handles this setup very well. The only two big issues are:
1) The internal partition in the case needs some minor modding to work with AMD motherboards.
2) The Sapphire 4830 board is a little loud at idle.

I'll post more notes and pictures as I have time. Follow the photo links and you can see my other pics.

Interesting little chasis. I came up with something similar many years ago, except I put the power supply behind the optical drive and above the CPU. That allowed me to stuff a full-size ATX motherboard underneath. I put the hard drive under the CD-ROM, and put a 120mm fan opening in the front left side of the case. With positive pressure I just had a hole on the right side of the case with a duct around the CPU heatsink. I could fit both a Radeon 9700 and a Voodoo 5 5500 in it. Not bad for a 6"x12"x10" case.



Looks like a Radeon 8500 was installed in this picture.



You can see the hole for the exhaust in the back right corner.

Notes on the case and included PS...

Here's the bare Mt Jade case:



The case doesn't have a case fan. Instead, it uses the CPU fan to bring air into the case and the PS fan to exhaust it. The case has a partition/duct to direct incoming air to the CPU fan.

Here's IN WIN's product page showing how the case fits together.

It comes with a FSP FSP300-60GLS 300W SFX power supply. Efficiency is rated at >75%.



The PS is rated 12V1@8A, 12V2@16A, so it probably has 280+ VA available at 12v assuming it's all coming from the same 12v source and we don't exceed 300W total output. One site lists 22A over-current protection on each 12v rail.

The PS has the normal MB power connectors, 3 4-pin molex and a floppy connector split between two cables, and two SATA power connections on one short cable. It has no PCI-e power connection.

Notes on initial assembly...

Motherboard, CPU, RAM, and stock retail heatsink and fan went in easily. Everything wired up well, although I did need a couple of extensions for the power leads.

Bare motherboard:



Main power and SATA connectors are at the front edge (bottom of pic).

Motherboard and drive wiring:



Not much room around the edges except at the front. Everything fits there pretty well, however.

The hard drive is in place in it's removable bay in the lower left. The built-in bay in the lower left corner is for a card reader, floppy, or second hard drive. DVD wiring is hanging loose in the lower right.

The cable with the two SATA power connections is too short to reach the DVD. The DVD power connection will be sitting above the center of the CPU fan. I used a molex/SATA adapter on one of the molex taps to reach.

The ATX12v/P4 motherboard connection barely reached the connector in the upper right. In order to reach, it had to go right through the PCI-e card area. Instead I used a 10" molex/ATX12v adapter which let me route it around the front and right side of the case.

The way I wired it means that all the 12v power is coming off one PS rail. The HD 4830 and 4850e combined should stay well within the 20A current limit, however. Someday, I'll get an ATX12v extension to get the 4850e 12v back on to the 12V2 rail. For a hotter CPU, that would probably be necessary.

Sapphire HD 4830 board in place:



The 4830 has one PCI-e power connector. I attached this with a molex/PCI-e adapter to the remaining molex tap.

Notes on the partition and final assembly...

The DVD drive and cage in position (partition not installed):



View through the DVD cage/duct to the CPU:



The plastic partition sits under the DVD cage and creates a plenum above the CPU fan for the incoming air. It was designed for Intel boards, however, so the AMD fan doesn't line up:



You can also see from this shot that the left edge of the partition lines up with the PCI-e x1 slot, which is to the right of the x16 slot. The partition has an angled corner along the bottom, but a tall PCI-e x1 card might still hit it. A low profile card should be no problem.

With the adjustment plate removed. you can see there's still interference at the corner:



With a little trimming and a new plate, it can be modified to fit. I didn't want to start carving right away however, so first I ran it without the partition and without the HD 4830.

Then I made this cardboard version to see how much it helped cooling:



The partition makes a noticeable difference. It dropped the CPU temperature at idle by about 3 C, and full load temp by 6 C.

Once I decide whether to keep the stock CPU fan or not, I'll modify the partition to fit. In the meantime, the cardboard one works pretty well.

Case top on with vent over the CPU fan (no partition in this shot):



Shot of the back with vent behind CPU (no partition in this shot):



The partition blocks off the rear vent from the CPU, it just feeds into the open case area. The PS fan does draw some air in here.

Final notes on noise, power, and temps...

I measured power using a Kill-a-Watt, CPU temps and fan speed with the ASUS PC Probe II, and GPU temps with Catalyst Control Center.

I can't get GPU fan speeds. GPU-Z 0.2.8 doesn't recognize the Sapphire card, and CCC doesn't report GPU fans speed, only fan %.

I can't measure northbridge temps. The only other temperature sensor on the ASUS MB is a "MB" sensor that seems to be more of ambient case temp.

All performance and cooling settings are stock. ASUS Q-Fan and AMD Cool and Quiet are enabled.

I first ran without the HD 4830 to get a baseline.

Without the HD 4830, the noise is from the PSU fan and stock CPU cooler only. Both are about the same sound level at CPU idle and fairly quiet, although certainly not silent. If you're familiar with a stock AMD CPU fan running at 2300 RPM, then that's about what the PSU sounds like.

Overall, it's very quiet by normal PC standards. The IN WIN product page claims 30dB at idle with a low-power Intel CPU and power saving features. I don't have any way to measure my setup, but it must be about the same using the 4850e, C&Q and Q-Fan.

For general use, it's not intrusive, even sitting on the desktop. In a quiet setting, it is audible so for HTPC use, I would probably look into fan swaps to try to quiet it down just a little. For a cheap, stock case it's great though, especially if you need room for full-height cards.

The Caviar Green drive is also great. If you get within 2 feet and concentrate, you can hear it over the fans, but it's hardly noticeable. It's hard mounted in this case. A foam pad or suspension mount would probably make it inaudible over the fans.

The LG drive I used (GH22NS30) is fine overall. At times the seeks seem nosier than the other drives I have.

The power measurements are very similar to those reported here in the SPCR review of the Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H. I've got 4GB RAM, so some of the power readings reflect a few extra watts compared to the Gigabyte setup reviewed.



Next I installed the Sapphire HD 4830. Sapphire used their own cooling design. The good news is, it's much better at cooling than the ATI reference design. The bad news is it's apparently much louder at idle.

At idle, the Sapphire fan is much louder than the PSU or CPU fan. With the Sapphire installed, the overall noise level is no longer "quiet" but more like "on the quieter side of average". This is very different from the almost unnoticeable effect of the ATI 4830 at idle reported here in the SPCR review.

The GPU temps are also much different, however.



Compare to 55C idle/85C load for the ATI card.

Ironically, I'm in the opposite situation as many HD4800 series owners. I'd like to give up a little idle cooling for less fan noise. Unfortunately, the manual fan control in Catalyst Overdrive do not allow reducing the stock fan speeds, only increasing.

The 165W (input) total is well within the PSU 300W (output) rating. Even assuming all that power goes to one 12v rail output, it's also well under the PSU 12v capacity and a 20A rail current limit.

A side note on the Sapphire - the driver support seems to be lagging. I didn't see the manual fan control option in Overdrive until I just updated to the new 8.11. It wasn't there in 8.10 for this card. I also had to manually select the 8.11 4800 series driver for installation by Vista. For some reason, it didn't install automatically.

Part of the issue may be that the Sapphire card (and apparently the HIS 4830 card) reports the GPU as "944C" rather than RV770. This also confuses GPU-Z.

Overall, I really like the Mt. Jade case. It's a cheap, quiet, compact case. The PSU looks small on paper, but has plenty of power for my configuration plus some headroom for another expansion card or a mid-power Phenom in the future.

The Sapphire HD 4830 is a great card for moderate gaming on a budget. It's better cooled than most 4800 series, and from reviews seems to overclock better than most 4830s. The cooling comes at the cost of increased noise, particularly at idle. For my purposes, that's OK. If you're more concerned about noise than GPU temps or overclocking, then look into other versions of the 4830.