Holiday Case and Power Supply Guide
by Wesley Fink on December 16, 2008 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Guides
- Christoph Katzer
We tested the Antec Three Hundred not long ago and we found it to be a small chassis which could even handle a triple-SLI with Nvidia's Geforce 8800 Ultra. The sleek design and the attractive price of around $50 make it a good recommendation for people building small to medium setups.
The P182 is a classic chassis but at the same time it is one of the best ever made: It combines very good quality with the ability to be very silent if you want it to. All sides are shielded to prevent most of the acoustic noise, which makes the Antec P182 attractive even for larger builds with modern high-end graphics cards. It has still a high price tag of $150 but this case is worth every penny spent.
Silverstone's full aluminum tower made a great impression with very good cooling performance using two large fans in a full aluminum case. Silverstone utilizes a “positive air-pressure“ technique that pumps more air inside of the case than fans are exhausting. The positive pressure then pushes the hot air out of every hole in the case. When we changed the direction of the fan from stock we immediately saw higher temperatures and poorer cooling results. The stock positive pressure design really did cool better in our testing. You can find our full review of the FT01 at http://www.anandtech.com/casecoolingpsus/showdoc.aspx?i=3454.
The overall quality of the Silverstone FT01 chassis is unmatched today which brings Silverstone to the top of the food chain when it comes to a high-end chassis. Enthusiasts with enough money to spend will not be disappointed in the FT01. It is not cheap with a price of $210 to $250, but the FT01 remains an exceptional value in a high-end case.
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ccd - Tuesday, December 16, 2008 - link
You gave a holiday recommendation for an HTPC mobo, why not for a case as well???ccd - Tuesday, December 16, 2008 - link
You gave a holiday recommendation for an HTPC mobo, why not for a case as well???Mastakilla - Tuesday, December 16, 2008 - link
i'm missing a nice powersupply between 500-600Wi'm gonna compose a nice budget desktop for my brother soon and i'm planning to use an overclocked Q6600 with a cheap ATI videocard
I don't think the 400W will be enough for that
and the 750W PC&P is just overkill and too expensive
strikeback03 - Wednesday, December 17, 2008 - link
My desktop system here at work uses a Q6600@3GHz, P35 chipset, 3GB RAM, and a NVIDIA 7300GT graphics card. Power draw at the wall is a little over 100W at idle IIRC, and max is under 200W. I built the system with a 650W Enermax Infiniti PSU as we were considering moving to much more powerful graphics cards to support the OpenGL work we were doing at the time. So I would guess the 400W might be OK, and through tomorrow at Newegg is $60 with a 20% off code and a $20 MIR, so $28 plus shipping after MIR.zebrax2 - Tuesday, December 16, 2008 - link
same comment as you. it like they went from low end to higher low end then they skipped the midrange then went ahead with higher midrange and lastly hi-end.StraightPipe - Tuesday, December 16, 2008 - link
That 1000W PSU is nice, but if it's not available yet, it's nto a very good recommendation.How about recommending a big daddy i can find on the market?
Core2 Quad Q9300 - OC @ 3.6GHz
Tuniq 120Tower
4x1GB Corsair Dominator @ DDR2-800
NVidia 8800GTS
Areca 1220 RAID card:
OS-2x150GB Raptor RAID0
STORAGE-4x1TB Seagate RAID5
16xDVD-RW
16xDVD-RW
Sound Blaster X-fi
5 Case fans (120mm, 120mm, 90mm, 80mm, 80mm)
Ear plugs (just kidding)
I was using an OZC Elite 800Watt PSU, but it died after 2 months...waiting on RMA now, but think i might be better off with 1000W
StraightPipe - Tuesday, December 16, 2008 - link
So in review, you've recommended a 300W, 400W and a 750W PSU.Lots of gaps left to fill. Instead of breaking the "Guide" down by price points, i'd think a breakdown by power supplied would be more appropriate. Maybe 100-150W intervals from 300-1200 would be good.
I guess I'll just start digging through the Cases/Cooling/PSUs section.
strikeback03 - Wednesday, December 17, 2008 - link
http://www.anandtech.com/casecoolingpsus/showdoc.a...">http://www.anandtech.com/casecoolingpsus/showdoc.a...Your exact components are not on there, but using stuff that is close and picking some worst-case estimates for other components (chipset) it seems doubtful that your system draws over 450W max. So something in the 800W range would probably serve you well, so long as you were not anticipating an upgrade to an SLI/Crossfire setup. If you were, then 900-1000 watts might be justified, though you would probably still be OK with 800.
Crusty - Tuesday, December 16, 2008 - link
While it's nice finally seeing some decent buying guides if these were done say for the first of December they would be far more useful. I've done all my shopping already, and even those that haven't will have a hard time getting the items shipped on time for Christmas.bovinda - Tuesday, December 16, 2008 - link
Though I always enjoy reading your guys' guides, I have to agree, wish they'd been around about two weeks ago. :)