Post
by Steve_Y » Fri Feb 24, 2006 3:23 am
It's funny seeing that case still being rebranded and sold 4-5 years after I built a system using one, especially considering the shelf life of most computer components. When I bought it the case came with a 300W PSU and cost around £25 so was a pretty good deal at the time, I was totally uninterested in silencing and mainly bought it for looks and the screwless installation of drives and PCI cards. I imagine the PSU has been upgraded, but Nexus seem to be charging a surprisingly large amount of money for such an old case design.
As other people have noted, the airflow through this case is terrible by modern standards, it has easily the worst rear fan mount I've ever seen and the front has very little air intake. On those images you can't really see what a mess the rear 92mm fan mount actually is. It's mounted with a plastic fan bracket that allows fans to rattle and vibrate badly, and if you look closely at the above images you can just about see that the rear fan grill isn't flat, the half nearer the motherboard's ports is significantly indented. Because of the difference in depth at the rear of the case there's a significant gap between half of the fan and the fan grill, I imagine this increases turbulence, damages airflow and it makes it tricky to mod it with a better fan mounting method. Even worse is the fan grill, lots of cases have a restrictive fan grill but thanks to the plastic skin on top of the metal case, this case actually has two of them. On my case the metal and plastic grills weren't aligned properly, the plastic skin blocked about 90% of the metal grill it covered and made the rear fan virtually useless. Thankfully cutting away the plastic was easy enough, and the hole is in a decent position to act as an air intake for the CPU. I think this case is unsuitable for any system that can't be cooled with the PSU's fan on its own.
The good thing about this case is its solid construction and its sound blocking properties. This is a nice and heavy steel case, with rolled edges on drive cages and a surprising feeling of quality considering its price. The steel panels of the case are covered on all sides by quite a thick layer of plastic. I'd be willing to bet that the dual layer construction was purely for aesthetics (I think they really liked Apple's G4) and the designers didn't even consider the noise blocking properties, when I bought it there wasn't a single mention of quietness in the advertising. But for noise blocking and vibration reduction the thick dual layer panels do work very well, noise from hard disks and fans is reduced and you get a nice dull thud when you tap on the case. The side panel fits very solidly to the case and doesn't vibrate easily, thanks to the use of steel rather than aluminium it feels heavier and much more sturdy than the side panels of my Antec P180. Considering how long this case has been around I'm surprised more "low noise" cases haven't created something similar.
When I built the PC I was only interested in building a cheap games machine and didn't care much about the noise level, but when I transferred the components into a Coolermaster Centurion a few years later I immediately noticed how much louder it became. The dual layers blocked a significant amount of hard disk noise, as well as noise from the CPU, PSU and graphics card fans. The optical drive covers also help with reducing noise, this is something that's ignored totally on a lot of modern high-end "silent" cases. I ended up going back to this case despite its poor cooling capabilities, and this is one of the things that made me start looking at computer noise reduction.
It's certainly not a case for hot running modern computers, but its noise reduction properties make it a very good case for a low power system. I'm currently using it as an MP3/CD/DVD player with a passively cooled PIII (the rear fan hole is used for an air intake duct), only the PSU fan is cooling the system. Its lack of airflow isn't a problem for a system like that and noise from the remaining sound sources in the case is lower than it would be with most other unmodded cases, not bad considering it cost me less than a few sheets of AcoustiPack. Of course for most people there are much better options available today.
