TR Forums

Ok, on the advice of cRock and JustAnEngineer, I ordered an Antec SX635 (ordered wednesday, recieved friday;the joy of living near the warehouse center of america, Dallas). So anyway, I haven't gotten any internals for it yet, but that shouldn't stop anyone from stripping down their new case and checking what everything does, how it attaches, etc.

During this inspection I come upon a weird handle-looking thing labeled in the manual "card guide." What the heck is this? I can't see any use for it, other than the fact that the holes in the middle of it line up with the expansion slots in the back of the case.

Thanks for the help

It looks like that card guide can be mounted on the front of the case so that if you have any full-length PCI or (shudder) ISA cards, they will be kept in alignment. Otherwise, the weight of the card in the tower configuration might cause it to bump into the full-length card in the next slot.

The last full-length card that I saw was a 4-color EGA card in an IBM XT sometime in the 1980's. Most cards today are half-length or smaller. (Voodoo5-5500 AGP is 9-5/8").

Hmm, possible "full-length" peripheral cards:
1) Professional caliber graphics cards ala 3DLabs Wildcat 6210.
2) Multi-channel RAID controllers like the Adaptec SCSI RAID 5400-S or the 3Ware Escelade 7800 IDE.
3) Multi-port Gigabit ethernet or fibre channel controllers.

In other words, nothing that you will be likely to be using in your machine. But they are out there....

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: lenzenm on 2002-03-22 20:20 ]</font>