TR Forums

flip-mode wrote:

The one thing that Antec needs to do with this case is provide mounts for 2.5" drives - SSDs in other words. Still, it's not much of a worry since SSD's aren't highly susceptible to damage from minor movement. I put the SSD in the bottom 5.25" bay, the optical drive in the top 5.25" bay, and then stuffed extra PSU leads under the optical bay which essentially ends up holding the SSD in place.

Mount two 2½" drives in one 3½" bay:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817994072
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817994087
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817998073
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6816215157

Mount four 2½" drives in one 5¼" bay:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6816215253

flip-mode wrote:

Sadly, the Firepro V3800 heatsink fan ended up being more noticeable that hoped (not bad, but it can actually be heard and I was hoping for something undetectable like the fan on the HD 2400), and so swapping the side panels so the panel without any vent closed off the active side of the case did indeed reduce the noticeability of the Firepro's fan. The case has excellent ventilation so I'm not worried about losing the side vent at all.

The system ends up being acoustically undetectable in the office, but in a very quiet room I'm pretty sure I'd have to end up doing something about that Firepro's fan.

Would you consider a FirePro 2270 for the next build?

After a few weeks in service, these machines are doing fantastic. Absolutely stable, very powerful, very quiet, and they do look nice enough sitting on the desk.

And I have to say that the FirePro card really cannot be heard at all unless I stick my head up against the case. The fan slows down once the drivers load in Windows.

I love the NSK 3480. I do wish the front panel was black instead of silver. But that's the worst I can say about the case. The PSU seems strong and stable and is virtually silent.

The i5-2500 is power by the truck load and I love it. At one point I had 6 instances of 7-zip archiving going on and each instance was running two to three times faster than on the Pentium D machine that normally handles the creation of those archives. Revit runs much more smoothly than on the Core 2 Duo E8500, though some of that may be thanks to the FirePro. The FirePro V3800 also does video transcoding through the driver and it is extremely fast and the quality is good.

The Scythe Rasetsu is totally overkill for stock or mildly overclocked operation. The Coolermaster TX3 is much more appropriate and runs virtually silently.

Bear in mind, all comments made about the silent and quiet operation of these components are made in the context of an open office environment with a high noise floor than the typical home office.

Great to hear that those builds turned out ok. What did the higher-ups have to say about them?

morphine wrote:

Great to hear that those builds turned out ok. What did the higher-ups have to say about them?

They seem happy with them, i.e. they have had very little to say.

If I were to change anything it would be to go for the Firepro V4800 rather than the V3800. The 4800 has slightly faster clocks, twice the RAM and is DDR5 rather than DDR3 and has more display-outs and what looks like a better heatsink for just another $60.