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Installation
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Because the case is so small, there isn't much room to work with.
Installation was quite easy with the exception of the Power Supply.
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I
realized only after installing the motherboard that the PSU wouldn't fit and
would need to be installed first. We even had to remove the
support bar shown above in order to provide just enough clearance to slide it
through. It was still quite difficult to slide it into place and
actually ended up slightly scratching the nice shiny aluminum interior. The
picture on the right above shows you just how close the motherboard is to the
Power Supply. This is not by any means an issue but I wanted to
demonstrate the limited room you will have to work with. This is
understandable though considering the case height measures in at only 16.2
inches.
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Considering there are only two fans(one only a 60mm), we kept it simple
and installed one hard drive and one CD drive in order to keep case
temperature at a minimum.
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The
front bays can easily be pushed out from the rear without having to remove the
whole front panel. As mentioned earlier, the case would look great
with one black CD-ROM installed on the first bay. The other
inserts have the two silver buttons on each side which look quite attractive
and add to its overall great looks. The side bubble light strips look
great and light a deep blue in color. Without a doubt, its most
attractive feature.
We were now ready to test its cooling performance.
Performance
To
test its cooling performance, we ran the system both at idle and under load
using Sandra 2003 and recorded the temperatures using Motherboard Monitor.
Test Setup
Motherboard: Abit KT7A
CPU: AMD Athlon 1.4 (stock speed)
Video Card: ATI AIW Radeon 7500
Cooling: Thermalright AX-7 with Med Speed 80mm Sunon Fan
Temps
at idle (measured 15 minutes after powered on)
So
far so good!
Temps
under load
As
you can see, the temperatures increased significantly after continuous use.
This was expected considering its max cooling capabilities. Keep in mind
that this was running the processor at stock speed. Athlon T-Birds run
rather hot so you may get a slightly lower reading with Intel processors.
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The
rear 60mm fan is simply not enough to exhaust all the heat from the case.
While the fan did actually provided a decent amount of airflow, the back fan
mount is not completely cut off and restricts airflow. This can easily
be fixed with a good old dremel (A handy tool of choice for a majority of PC
users these days).
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