IN-WIN BUC: Just How Much $100 Can Buy
by Dustin Sklavos on May 9, 2011 4:28 PM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
- In-Win
- mid-tower
Assembling the IN-WIN BUC
While the SilverStone FT03 we recently reviewed required some level of instruction to assemble, the BUC doesn't come with a manual. You can download one online, but the overall design of the case is smart enough that we doubt you'll need it.
Installing the motherboard was easy enough thanks to the built-in standoffs on the tray, and there are plenty of cable routing holes surrounding it to keep the internals relatively clean. It's worth mentioning there's a decent-sized cutout in the tray for cooler backplates; hopefully at some point Intel will realize their push-pin mounting system sucks hard (I've actually seen a machine where the pins deteriorated after just a couple of years and the stock heatsink fell off), but until then it's nice to see most case manufacturers have us covered.
Removing the covers for the external bays is also painless as I mentioned before, though every bay below the top one has a metal piece you'll need to twist and remove. From there, pop out the fastening knobs, slide the optical drive in, then push the pins in and you're good. Again, this is a remarkably simple and sturdy system, and I never felt like the drive was anything less than completely secure. If that's not satisfactory, though, you can actually screw the drive in on the opposite side.
Unfortunately, the 3.5" drive trays aren't toolless and can be a source of some frustration. You have to squeeze the handle from the sides to loosen these trays up, but that's easier said than done and can require a remarkable amount of effort. That calls into question the usefulness of the hotswappable drive bay door, but the system does essentially work. To install a 3.5" drive, you need to first install rubber standoffs, then use special screws included with the case to mount the drive. This worked fine with a pair of Western Digital drives I tested, but an ever-so-slightly wider Seagate Barracuda just plain wouldn't fit using the side screws and had to be attached to the bottom of the tray. Once you're done it's good to go and lines up perfectly with the backplane, but the extra steps here and difficulty actually swapping drives can be a nuisance. 2.5" drives are bottom mounted in the trays with the mounting holes clearly labeled; these don't have any kind of vibration dampening, but you're expected to mount SSDs with no moving parts so it's a non-issue.
The backplane is probably one of my favorite features and a surprising inclusion in a case at this price. It basically consolidates power connections into just two plugs, and already has SATA cables built in that for the most part easily route to the ports on the motherboard. While it's necessary for any kind of hotswap functionality to even work, I was just happy it was there to make cable routing that much simpler.
Installing expansion cards with the built-in mounting system was surprisingly painless. The GTX 580 lined up and locked into place on the motherboard, and then the clamps came down and did their job. No muss, no fuss, although if you like you can also screw the card in.
Beyond hard drive and SSD installation, there were really two points that did require a bit of fuss during assembly. The first is the power supply, which essentially "snaps" into place but still didn't feel quite as clean as the other parts of the case did. I had to apply some measure of force to get it in, and from there it felt...mostly secure. In that instance I did wind up using screws to secure it in the back of the enclosure, and for those that are concerned, there's ventilation (and a removable filter) beneath the power supply. My other snag came with installing a 120mm fan in the side panel. There are vibration-dampening rubber grommets included, but these pop out relatively easily and so installation effectively requires lining up three elements instead of two: the fan, the grommets, and the screw holes. I was able to do it, but case fans almost never feel like they mount right and this was no exception.
After all was said and done, my only major complaint was, surprisingly, cable routing. I had issues with this with the Antec P182 and again with the Corsair 600T, and I was hoping I wouldn't run into it here after our IN-WIN rep showed us some other models (we do have one more IN-WIN case on hand we'll be reviewing in the future) that had ample space behind the motherboard tray expressly for cabling. Getting the right-hand side panel back on proved to be an exercise in frustration and brute force, as it often tends to be with other enclosures, and my feeling is this: if you don't have enough space behind your motherboard tray for a molex connector to stand on its side, you don't have enough space. Mercifully the BUC's side panels are fairly flexible and can bow enough to handle it (unlike, say, the P182/183), but this is an issue that we shouldn't even be having at this point. I'm willing to accept a case that's a half inch wider if it means I don't have to grunt every time I put the side panel back on.
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Ammaross - Monday, May 9, 2011 - link
"Oh yes, they must be stealing content. No one ever backups their DVD or BR collection, no one ever edits HD video"I fully agree. A single blu-ray disk takes up to 30GB to take a 1:1 copy. My DVDs run up to the 8GB range. Taking my entire DVD/BR collection easily fills a couple 2TB drives. It all used to be scattered on 1TB/1.5TB drives until I upgraded to a couple 2TBs. Where are the other drives? I left them in the machine for scratch disk and future storage. Yes, I do have home videos and the like that I keep too. Not quite to the space requirements of BR disks, but I don't like to store my videos in DiVX or such bad-quality formats (as opposed to lightly-compressed 1080p MPEG4).
Oh, and the comment regarding photos, I'm a bit of a shutter-bug, and even my modest 8.1MP camera takes 3.4MB pictures. Pass them through Photoshop, saving the original of course, and saving in a 90% quality can bloat those to 6MB after touchups. I'd say there's a good 3GB per event I save. It all adds up.
bji - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - link
Is it legal to 'back up' DVDs and BR discs in this way? I doubt it since it requires circumventing encryption mechanisms. I agree that it doesn't seem ethically wrong to back up something you own even if it is technically illegal.That being said, what's the point? Are these discs really so important that they need to be backed up? I've never backed up a DVD or Blu-Ray disc in my life and I've never lost or broken one either. I can't imagine wasting my time (and money) spending it backing up DVDs and Blu-Ray discs.
But I guess that's beside the point; I asked for legitimate ways to fill up large amounts of hard disk space and I got at least one answer of something that is technically probably not legal but not so immoral in any case.
So am I to believe that the vast majority of people who claim to need 8 or 10 hard drives in their computer do so because of backing up DVDs and Blu-Ray discs? It's not hoarders of pirated movies and software?
JarredWalton kind of made my point for me I think; four years of his work on a technology site only uses 70 GB of his disk and all of his personal photos take 30 GB more. That's only 100 GB. Even with the addition of a 1024p24 video camera, it sounds like a 500 GB drive would buy years of video storage at a reasonable rate of accumulation thereof.
Add another 500 GB drive for his Steam games and with a grand total of 1 TB it looks like JarredWalton, certainly a 'power user' if there ever was one, is completely covered in storage needs.
mXan - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - link
A WTV movie recorded from TV is about 8GB.A Linux distribution is about 4GB.
Every ISO of Windows, Office, Visual Studio, etc. is about that, and I can legally own them, since I'm an MSDN subscriber.
GoG games downloads often range in the GB region, sometimes ~4GB (while other times they are 1MB! depends on the game).
Every Virtual Machine you install requires a virtual hard drive, go figure 30-50GB each.
I currently have 4TB storage at home, perfectly legal.
JMC2000 - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - link
My Steam folder (which is on a 320GB drive) is almost 100GB, and that is just for 18 game and a couple of mods (Stalker: CS, Stalker: COP, Street Fighter 4 and UT3). If I was to install the 57 other games that I have purchased on Steam (publisher packs ftw!), I would more than likely take up more than 2/3 of the drive.Some of the space is occupied by legally backed up GBA/DS/GC games that I had, but were stolen.
It is entirely possible to fill up even a 2TB with legally obtained material.
If I had the space, I would back up all of the movies I own and stream them from a server, that way, I can keep the discs safely stored.
kkwst2 - Monday, May 9, 2011 - link
Please don't feed the trolls! :)bji - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - link
Well I admit that my comment was somewhat inflammatory because it presumed that most people could not legitimately fill up a drive without stealing content. I just could not imagine needing that much space for legitimate reasons but clearly I missed:1. People who 'back up' huge collections of legitimately owned DVDs and Blu-Ray discs. I can't personally imagine why you'd go through the trouble but I admit that for people who place high value on these items, having a back up is not an unreasonable way to use hard drive space.
2. People who buy and play tens of games per year and have to keep them all on their hard drive all the time.
3. People who collect huge digital home videos
I think that most people don't fall into any of these camps but on an enthusiast site, certainly you'd find more people in one or more of these categories.
DJMiggy - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - link
640K ought to be enough for anybody.dagamer34 - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - link
They back them up for quick access and so their kids don't ruin the disc. Heck, what ever happened to "innocent until proven guilty?"Jalek99 - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - link
"clearly I missed:"People who don't do things as you do.
"most people don't fall into any of these camps"
More assuming that YOU are the norm others should be measured against. Could it be that you are the outlier?
People who play Warcraft alone likely have 15+ gb of space tied up at least before they add to it, and there seems to be quite a few current or former players who probably still have the thing installed. Add in any of several other games at 5-10gb and the numbers just climb.
The less technical the user, the more likely it is that installed games or old programs will never be uninstalled.
I started using a media server long ago and found it to be incredibly convenient with children and relatives' children as no media gets damaged or misplaced moving from room to room. When you purchase a television series on 35 DVD's or more, do you really want to keep those sorted instead of ripping them all and selecting from menus?
As for the geekier side, website backups and developer database, ebooks (some of which cost as much as a bound book), scanned records (paperless office to the extent possible), and then email backups of receipts and registrations, and somewhere in there there's a photo or two and a partially complete thesis with copies of supporting documents. Between utilities and MSDN downloads is at least another 100gb.
I also have shelves of DVD's and CD's, though I prefer not to have to access those. The books I'm not about to scan myself so if there's no digital alternative, they're also on a shelf.
Shall I also explain my 60x40 shop contents and why it's full to the rafters or is that acceptable in your view?
bji - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - link
OK well I officially stand corrected.I had always had this apparently ill founded belief that most people who had huge hard drive collections did so so that they could hoard downloaded movies, but I can see that there are many other legitimate uses that require huge amounts of space. I still don't know what the result would be if you polled all users instead of just computer enthusiast readers of Anandtech, but certainly for a not insignificant segment of the computer user space, large amounts of space are clearly useful.
Sorry to have stirred up such a ruckus, I kinda knew I shouldn't have started in with an inflammatory comment like that.