Re: New system advice

Fitz wrote:
Ken wrote:

I saw a review of the Antec 180 on youtube. The way the PS cables exit the lower chamber, they seem to come out adjacent to the last PCI slot and even with a short card, it seemed to be a problem, possibly not allowing use of the last PCI slot position. Have you found this to be a problem in your systems?

Thanks
Ken K

I don't use the lower PCI slot, but I don't think routing a cable to it would be a problem. After seeing the review at Toms Hardware, I took a couple pics of the inside of my case, and would email them to you if you wanted to look at them. I think the review was somewhat misleading. The author complained about the lack of instructions, but I found the case to be pretty straight-forward. The "expert" failed to connect the Aux 12V 4 pin connector, couldn't figure out the problem and dismantled the build to start over again (with tools borrowed from a some else's shop). Once he figured out the problem, he also realized he had selected a power supply that didn't even have the 4 pin connector. I'm sure the motherboard instructions addressed this, but he apparently didn't read them, so why he would complain about the lack of instructions for the case is beyond me. The pic he took of the case with the assembled parts didn't do it justice - it was a mess. I will say that with the separate compartments for the power supply and the rest of the system, routing and dressing the cables is time consuming and requires some effort, but I was pleased with the result.

Keep in mind I'm not recommending the P180. I think it's a great case, but there are lots of choices out there. The P180 provides lots of room to work with, and great cooling. I only use the bottom hard drive cage, and mounted the optional 120mm fan on the upper cage to blow over the graphics card. Since the motherboard I'm using has onboard RAID, Ethernet, plenty of USB ports, and 7.1 sound (that meets my needs), I don't have any additional PCI cards installed. I'm only using one GeForce 8800GTS, no SLI, which would obviously take up a lot more room.

Fitz

Thanks for the reply. I would, in fact, appreciate seeing the pictures. Please email them to techie at thekrones dot com.

I would be interested to hear which other cases you might suggest I look at. I want to have the capability of having a relative large number of hard drives, which is why I like my older Antec Performance plus case, which has 6 internal, 4 external 5 3/4" and 2 3 1/2. I want a cool case environment without water cooling, and a quiet case. I am looking at an Intel BOXDP35DPM LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX---nothing very trick for video
EVGA and a Core Duo processor.
EVGA 512-P3-N861-AR GeForce 9600GT 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16

I am just using the system for video editing (home, not commercial), Photoshop and Illustrator, and for basic excel, internet, etc. The reason for the hard drives is for storage of videos, although I may use my present Win2000 Antec, ASUS, P4, Win2K system as a server/storage system, but I haven't decided. Ultimately, I would use the new system as a server for home media, as well

Thanks for your input. I haven't followed hardware since I built my system a number of years ago.

Ken K

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