Antec Sonata IV vs. Progress: Round Four

Assembling the Antec Sonata IV

If nothing else, the Sonata IV is pretty easy to figure out, and though it may be missing a lot of modern accoutrement it isn't lacking in polish. Unfortunately there's one specific element to the design that makes the entire thing a little more difficult than it ought to be: the crossbar.

The crossbar that supports the power supply, coupled with the power supply's lack of modular cabling, means you're going to have to shimmy the motherboard in a bit. It's not a huge nuisance but it makes things a little difficult. And to anyone suggesting removing the power supply first, have I got a story for you.

During acoustic and thermal testing of the Sonata IV, the 620W Neo ECO power supply gave up the ghost--never a good thing. This is the first time I've seen an Antec PSU die, and it's not a cheap-sauce over-specced part. I'm really inclined to blame this squarely on bad luck, because the replacement unit was able to handle our overclocked workload perfectly fine. But when the first one went, there weren't any sparks or anything like that, the computer just shut down and the power supply emitted a soft buzzing. Antec rushed me a replacement power supply, and it was there that I truly experienced the most frustrating part of the assembly.

The crossbar that supports the power supply also makes it impossible to remove the power supply without also removing the heatsink from the processor, and for some heatsinks this is an exercise in "easier said than done". Missing the Allen wrench required to remove our testing heatsink, I wound up having to remove the entire motherboard to swap out the power supply. There really is just no easy way to do it. Now I know why Antec included such a beefy unit to begin with, because upgrading the PSU is a PITA.

Mounting the drive sleds to the 5.25" drive was easy enough, as was mounting the rails to the 3.5" hard drive. 3.5" drives are now secured to the case using easy-to-remove thumbscrews, and the arrangement does ensure proper airflow. Getting the 2.5" SSD we use for testing mounted was, however, another major issue.

The mounting system they use for a 2.5" SSD has two serious problems. The first is that while it's space economical, lining up the thumbscrews to attach to the bottom of the drive through the holes in the drive cage is an exercise in frustration. There's no way to sugar coat it: this is needlessly difficult to do. Yet even when you do manage to get it mounted, you'll be confronted with another problem: there isn't enough clearance between the lip of the drive cage and the drive connectors. I wound up having to remove the drive, connect the power and SATA cables, and then squeeze it back into place. This is a problem that could've been avoided by moving the drive mounts a few millimeters toward the right side, but that still doesn't correct the poorly conceived mounting system.

Thankfully, getting the video card installed wasn't a big deal. While I wouldn't even try getting a Radeon HD 6990 or GTX 590 into this case, our GTX 580 fit without too much fuss. Cards that connect the power cables to the back instead of the top are going to be more problematic, but clearance is reasonable enough.

Finally, getting everything wired up is difficult for two reasons: there's no cable management to speak of, and the lack of a modular power supply means you wind up with a lot of extra harnesses on most systems. The latter can be ameliorated by simply swapping in another power supply (thus defeating the purpose of using a Sonata IV), but the former has no real solution. Antec probably should've widened the case and allowed for cables to be routed/stashed behind the motherboard tray, especially for a design so dependent on clean airflow. Clearance between the top of the motherboard and the bottom of the power supply means more trouble with the AUX 12V line.

On the flip side, the Neo ECO includes the needed cables to connect the GTX 580 we used in testing: 6-pin PCI-E and 6+2-pin PCI-E connectors are present, both through a single cable. I get the sense Antec expects builds using the Sonata IV to peak at about the configuration we use. Certainly we've powered dual GPUs off of lower wattage PSUs, but if you want to stick with AMD/NVIDIA spec you'll want at least 600W for SLI/CF builds.