Antec NSK3300: A Mini-P180?
Just got this case. BEST mAtx case on the market today IMO. I put a low power Pentium M processor in it with a 7600gs video card and a gig of memory with a notebook HD and slim optical drive.
Its one of the quietest computers ive ever seen. Even with the stock PSU fan, you cant hear it without getting right up next to it.
My choice of components is probably the biggest reason its so quiet though. I can actually run the system with zero fans except for the one in the PSU, although i do run a nexus 120mm at 5v as an exhaust just for good measure, since its basically inaudible at this speed anyhow.
The thing i love the most about it is the size. Wide enough to fit any large passive aftermarket heatsink, but still short and not too deep. I always laugh when people put down "cramped to work in" in small form factor cases. DUH!!! of course its going to be cramped, the whole idea is to make it as small as possible.
i did do 2 small mods to this case. first i drilled a whole in the black plasic cover that closes up the hole for the wires between the top and bottom sections of the case, then turned it around so the cables come out the bottom(when its sitting on its side) instead of the top like it does by default. secondly, i took the stamped grill off the PSU. if you just take out the 4 screws holding the fan in place, you can lift the stamped grill right off and theres still 4 points to screw the fan back onto the PSU but without the grill. This lowered air turbulance and fan noise considerably, and was a very easy mod. I'm suprised the reviewer didnt notice this or try it.
I am planning on doing a fan swap with the PSU fan to a nexus 80mm. Chances are it wont start at 3.8v but that doesnt bother me. The fan will kick in when the PSU warms up enough for the fan controller to up the fan voltage enough to make the fan start. Until then it will be a passive Power Supply. I'm hoping since i have such a low power system, that the PSU fan may actually stay off while just idle'ing.
Its one of the quietest computers ive ever seen. Even with the stock PSU fan, you cant hear it without getting right up next to it.
My choice of components is probably the biggest reason its so quiet though. I can actually run the system with zero fans except for the one in the PSU, although i do run a nexus 120mm at 5v as an exhaust just for good measure, since its basically inaudible at this speed anyhow.
The thing i love the most about it is the size. Wide enough to fit any large passive aftermarket heatsink, but still short and not too deep. I always laugh when people put down "cramped to work in" in small form factor cases. DUH!!! of course its going to be cramped, the whole idea is to make it as small as possible.
i did do 2 small mods to this case. first i drilled a whole in the black plasic cover that closes up the hole for the wires between the top and bottom sections of the case, then turned it around so the cables come out the bottom(when its sitting on its side) instead of the top like it does by default. secondly, i took the stamped grill off the PSU. if you just take out the 4 screws holding the fan in place, you can lift the stamped grill right off and theres still 4 points to screw the fan back onto the PSU but without the grill. This lowered air turbulance and fan noise considerably, and was a very easy mod. I'm suprised the reviewer didnt notice this or try it.
I am planning on doing a fan swap with the PSU fan to a nexus 80mm. Chances are it wont start at 3.8v but that doesnt bother me. The fan will kick in when the PSU warms up enough for the fan controller to up the fan voltage enough to make the fan start. Until then it will be a passive Power Supply. I'm hoping since i have such a low power system, that the PSU fan may actually stay off while just idle'ing.
Yeah I've just finished building a second PC in an NSK3300. Learning from the first I went SATA with the hard-drive and optical drive, which helped enormously in the cramped upper bay. I've got a Zalman 7000 modded with a 92mm Nexus, a Samsung drive in the top bay. It's a brilliant little quiet system for such little effort.
The stock 120mm fan which comes with it isn't the best though; I'm running an undervolted Sempron so I've decided to remove the rear fan for now to see how it fares fanless. No problems so far.
The stock 120mm fan which comes with it isn't the best though; I'm running an undervolted Sempron so I've decided to remove the rear fan for now to see how it fares fanless. No problems so far.
Link Error
I've just read the very interesting review, but on hovering over this link on page 5:
Many thanks to Antec for supplying the NSK3300 sample.
Noticed it cheekily redirects you to the Lian-Li website instead of Antec!
Many thanks to Antec for supplying the NSK3300 sample.
Noticed it cheekily redirects you to the Lian-Li website instead of Antec!
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well, it is very fiddly to work in, so I'm not surprised people express their frustration. I've found it very useful to completely remove the floppy disk cage (it's only held in by one screw) - the extra bit of work space provided makes it easier to work in the cramped space. I've also completely removed that silly black pice of plastic covering the hole between the two compartments. no doubt this reduces the thermal efficiency of the case somewhat, but my components are low powered anyway and I just can't be bothered stuffing around with it.Aris wrote:I always laugh when people put down "cramped to work in" in small form factor cases. DUH!!! of course its going to be cramped, the whole idea is to make it as small as possible.
I wonder if this feature has been recently added? with my somewhat older nsk3300 the grill is part of the case itself (not screwed on) - I'd have to cut it out with tinsnipsAris wrote:if you just take out the 4 screws holding the fan in place, you can lift the stamped grill right off and theres still 4 points to screw the fan back onto the PSU but without the grill.
Well I just wanted to replace mine 3D Aurora case which was much,much bigger than I ever imagine.I bought it to replace standard HP case.When I got NSK33000 I realised that my PSU Tagan 480W would never fit with HP and Samsung DVD/DVD writer, I even didnt want to give it a chance and mod the case.I`ve replaced ANTEC TriCool with Arctic Cooling 12cm fan which I conected to MoBo with two Arctic Cooling 92mm fans on the front of the case.The case temperature never passes 35°C.The processor I have is not the state of the art (Pentium IV 540 3.2GHz),with 4x512Mb RAM,1xHD WD 200Gb and X-300 GPU system is preety quiet,altough sometimes I can hear Arctic Cooling CPU cooler.CPU temperature is around 40-42°C.I also had to give up mine new X-850XT because 300W wasn`t enough power to go with(black screens even when surfing the net not to mention the games)and had to return to my old but not so bad X-300.
And at the end guys one question:
I would like to replace X-300 with HIS X-1650XT ISilencer fanless GPU(for the moment not for sale in France) and what`s bodering me would 300W be enough to run it.Greetings.
And at the end guys one question:
I would like to replace X-300 with HIS X-1650XT ISilencer fanless GPU(for the moment not for sale in France) and what`s bodering me would 300W be enough to run it.Greetings.
http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics.html
Looks like the performance is exactly the same between X800XL and 7600GT.
Looks like the performance is exactly the same between X800XL and 7600GT.
rei,
I have Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro on my processor which is the same cooler as Freezer 64 only made for Intel socket 775 processor.Between cooler and upper chamber there is about 1.5 cm which doesn`t live great deal of space for the cables but that`s not a problem.The GPU I spoke about is the old ATI Radeon X-300 which I got whith mine HP on december 2004.X-850XT I bought in July 2006 but as I said before had to give it up when I got NSK-3300 because of 300W SFX PSU which didn`t gave enough power to run it.Now I am thinking of replacing old X-300 with 7600GT or X-1650XT both fanless.I know that 7600 nedds much less power but what`s bodering me is replacing ATI card with NVidia one.Is that possible only with uninstaling ATI drivers and instaling new NVidia drivers or I have to do something more.On several forums I saw that people had problems when changing beetwen ATI and NVidia and don`t want to pay 170-180$ for card that I am not sure will work on my MoBo.Any suggestions?Thanks.
I have Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro on my processor which is the same cooler as Freezer 64 only made for Intel socket 775 processor.Between cooler and upper chamber there is about 1.5 cm which doesn`t live great deal of space for the cables but that`s not a problem.The GPU I spoke about is the old ATI Radeon X-300 which I got whith mine HP on december 2004.X-850XT I bought in July 2006 but as I said before had to give it up when I got NSK-3300 because of 300W SFX PSU which didn`t gave enough power to run it.Now I am thinking of replacing old X-300 with 7600GT or X-1650XT both fanless.I know that 7600 nedds much less power but what`s bodering me is replacing ATI card with NVidia one.Is that possible only with uninstaling ATI drivers and instaling new NVidia drivers or I have to do something more.On several forums I saw that people had problems when changing beetwen ATI and NVidia and don`t want to pay 170-180$ for card that I am not sure will work on my MoBo.Any suggestions?Thanks.
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homer --
Before you remove the ATI card, just make sure you pull off every file related to its driver. IRRC, there's actually a couple of utility programs designed specifically to ensure complete removal of all vidcard driver related files.... here's one -- http://www.drivercleaner.net/
Before you remove the ATI card, just make sure you pull off every file related to its driver. IRRC, there's actually a couple of utility programs designed specifically to ensure complete removal of all vidcard driver related files.... here's one -- http://www.drivercleaner.net/
The nsk3300 I would say gets an E for effort but is a flawed, though not fatally so, design. I have a lot of experience with this case and here's what I learned. While the case is deep enough to handle a cooler like the ninja, practically speaking its not going to happen without pain. The reason is that wires are coming out of the top chamber in a way that is in direct conflict with any large tower heatsink. The wires are too short to go around the heatsink and there is not enough room between where the wires come out and the heatsink.
Even the Alpine is tough heatsink to fit in this case and that's one of the more manageable heatsinks around. S754 and s939 motherboard designs have the cpu very close to the edge of the motherboard and that is trouble in this particular case as it makes it extremely difficult to get a cooler that does not bump up against the wires coming from the top chamber and the floor of the chamber itself.
So the design where the wires "cross" the case in the upper chamber, then exit the top chamber is flawed, and I wonder what the thinking is behind that? The other problem is that the wires from the PSU are short. They need to be longer.
This is a rugged well built case that's the perfect size for a basic system. I wonder if a version two is in the works that solve these problems that are in rev 1.
regards
Even the Alpine is tough heatsink to fit in this case and that's one of the more manageable heatsinks around. S754 and s939 motherboard designs have the cpu very close to the edge of the motherboard and that is trouble in this particular case as it makes it extremely difficult to get a cooler that does not bump up against the wires coming from the top chamber and the floor of the chamber itself.
So the design where the wires "cross" the case in the upper chamber, then exit the top chamber is flawed, and I wonder what the thinking is behind that? The other problem is that the wires from the PSU are short. They need to be longer.
This is a rugged well built case that's the perfect size for a basic system. I wonder if a version two is in the works that solve these problems that are in rev 1.
regards
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Re: 2nd hard drive
Would it be pretty easy to redrill the HDD holes at the bottom of the case so that I could mount a hard drive a few inches forward thus not lose use of the bottom PCI card? Something like this (my TJ08):blacklit wrote:one other thing...
i noticed that adding a hard drive in the bottom chamber renders the last pci slot of the motherboard unusable. have you (anyone?) tried to fit a notebook drive in that location? i've not seen one so i'm not sure whether the screw holes will match. if it does fit... does it leave enough to use the last pci?
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Re: replaced by NSK3400
I'm looking forward to trying it out. Micro-atx motherboards have become much more crammed with features over the past few years, I am sure many people don't see the point in bothering with a full-sized atx motherboard when you can do just about everything with a micro-atx motherboard. so there is definitely a need for this smaller type of mini-tower case.NeilBlanchard wrote:Hello,
This case is apparently getting replaced by the NSK3400:
viewtopic.php?t=36712
Re: replaced by NSK3400
In the US, the similar, but superior, NSK3480 is now availableNeilBlanchard wrote:Hello,
This case is apparently getting replaced by the NSK3400:
viewtopic.php?t=36712
whereas outside the US, the NSK3400 is available
There are multiple threads about each within SPCR
Extra HDD Mount
to date, i've not found an acceptable solution out there to mount more drives to this case. there's more than one way to do this but here's a clean and simple suggestion with NO case tampering or modification required--for those who don't have the tools, time, or patience. this method allowed me to install: 2x SSD's in RAID0 (w/ room to spare for 4x SSD's) and 3x 2TB WD Black in RAID5.
questions, comments, concerns, just let me know ~
parts needed (easy finds):
- scythe kaze-jyu 100mm fan
- zip ties
- hard drive grommets
optional:
- nexus doubletwin (for 2nd hard drive)
- silverstone SDP08 (for 2.5" drives)
** there are others but the SDP08 exactly duplicates all mounting holes of a standard 3.5" drive
Parts Needed:
Scythe Kaze-Jyu 100mm Fan..
Scythe Fan mounted to HDD w/ 4x zip ties and 4x grommets ready (grommets in actual position once installed)..
2x thicker Silicone Grommets in place (suited for recessed fan grill)..
first two (2) Zip Ties secured..
four (4) zip ties secured..
HDD mounted..
Optional Parts:
attach a 2nd hard drive using a Nexus Doubletwin..
use a Silverstone SDP08 for 2.5" drives..
Scythe Bay Rafter - another option for 2.5" drives..
questions, comments, concerns, just let me know ~
parts needed (easy finds):
- scythe kaze-jyu 100mm fan
- zip ties
- hard drive grommets
optional:
- nexus doubletwin (for 2nd hard drive)
- silverstone SDP08 (for 2.5" drives)
** there are others but the SDP08 exactly duplicates all mounting holes of a standard 3.5" drive
Parts Needed:
Scythe Kaze-Jyu 100mm Fan..
Scythe Fan mounted to HDD w/ 4x zip ties and 4x grommets ready (grommets in actual position once installed)..
2x thicker Silicone Grommets in place (suited for recessed fan grill)..
first two (2) Zip Ties secured..
four (4) zip ties secured..
HDD mounted..
Optional Parts:
attach a 2nd hard drive using a Nexus Doubletwin..
use a Silverstone SDP08 for 2.5" drives..
Scythe Bay Rafter - another option for 2.5" drives..