SPCR

after fussing forever over what to buy, and after the money became available, and the wonderful advances in silent PC technology in mainstream midrange products - I've got a new machine. horray.

so here are the specs:

Case: Lancool PC-K58B Dragonlord (tooless)
CPU: AMD Phenom II x4 955 BE
Cooler: Artic Cooling Freezer Extreme
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-MA785GT-UD3H (AMD 785G DDR3)
RAM: Patriot 2x2GB DDR3
HD: SAMSUNG 500GB 16MB - 7200RPM S-ATA - SpinPoint F3
Gfx: Sapphire 5670 512MB GDDR5
PSU: HEC - 450W 80+ Bronze
DVDRW: LG DVD-RW GH22



internal assembly:









as you can see:

1) the aux power cable was too short to reach behind the motherboard, so it is a bit streched under the graphic card.

2) installing the cable tidy accesory makes a difference.

3) I isntalled the HD "backwards" so the the cables are outoff sght. this is by design.

I love the high quality feel of the plastic on this case.
The layout is great.

I might do some modding, to create a better air flow, or I might just turn off som of the fans.

Will have to get back on that later.

Nice build with nice case. My impressions are that this line of cases are sturdy but can you confirm this?

Cables look a bit short so I guess you cable management is the best you can do without extenders. Should be fine with airflow anyway.

How are acoustic levels? Any thoughts on suspending the HDD elastically?

bozar wrote:Nice build with nice case. My impressions are that this line of cases are sturdy but can you confirm this?

-- yes it's very sturdy. the side panels are exceptionally stiff, compared to any case I've handled in the past.

bozar wrote:Cables look a bit short so I guess you cable management is the best you can do without extenders. Should be fine with airflow anyway.

-- I'm going to see if I can get those extenders, though it seems that no one in this lame country sells them.

bozar wrote:How are acoustic levels? Any thoughts on suspending the HDD elastically?

-- the HDD seems fine, I don't get anything beside direct seek noise, that goes though the many open vents in this case. so I might mod the case for less direct air flow...

the CPU cooler has a rattle, that is ever so light. but I'm taking it in to be replaced. might be a design flaw, or just a faulty cooler. will have to wait and see. I tried removing the fan, but running in BIOS setup and it seemed to rise up to 50C and I wasn't sure it was done.

another point is the stock fans. the front 140mm is running at ~600 rpm - as quiet as I could wish for. but the rear 120 fan was running at ~1500 rpm and was very audible. so I unplugged it. didn't seem to hurt the CPU temps much. I left it running in BIOS setup and it seemed to stable out at 40C.

all in all the case is very pretty, and very open. so the air flow is very un focused.

I went in to the shop, and they replaced the Freezer Xtreme. it was in fact defective.

so I'll get on to installing the OS's (XP+Ubunto) and I'll report back.

Is the 140mm fan running at 600 RPM @ 12V? If so great deal with an awesome case.

using gigabyte's EasyTune and AMD-ATI catalyst I succeeded in tuning the front fan, the CPU fan and the GPU fan down to my liking.

I didn't succeed to tune down the rear 120 fan with speed fan. either because I'm a noob (first time with speed fan), or because GB's mobo doesn't support speed control on the third fan header (found something similar on a different GB mobo)

so I pulled it out. if my case get's too hot, I'll add a TT 120 I have that have a speed knob.

I'm working on a high detailed sketchup model of the case this will take a while.

Check startup voltage on the 120 mm fan, if it starts att 5V you can always connect it directly to a 5V PSU line. There is a thread on this forum on how to so just use the search function.

bozar wrote:Check startup voltage on the 120 mm fan, if it starts att 5V you can always connect it directly to a 5V PSU line. There is a thread on this forum on how to so just use the search function.

could do that. I've played with the 5/7/12 wiring options before.

tnks, I hadn't considered it. was thinking in the direction of a FanMate.