Nanoxia Deep Silence 2 Case Review: Trimming the Fat
by Dustin Sklavos on February 14, 2013 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
- quiet
- ATX
- Nanoxia
Assembling the Nanoxia Deep Silence 2
Apart from the accursed side panels, the Nanoxia Deep Silence 2 remains a fairly pleasant, easily assembled enclosure. There are definitely some small conveniences missing, but by and large Nanoxia's engineers continue to do right by the end user.
Disappointingly, Nanoxia doesn't include any extrusions on the motherboard tray, pre-installed standoffs, or an alignment stud the way a lot of modern enclosures have begun doing. This is a minor grievance but still annoying, as you'll be required to install all of the standoffs yourself. Connecting the motherboard headers remains easy, though, as Nanoxia smartly includes cable routing holes both near the cable bundle at the top of the case and between the motherboard and the power supply.
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Installing drives continues to be a fairly painless process. The toolless clamps used for the 5.25" drive bays are a smart design and feel secure, and I appreciate that they include clamps on both sides of the cage as opposed to just the left side. Meanwhile the drive trays continue to be incredibly sturdy, although they aren't toolless; you'll want to hold on to the screws used for bottom-mounting the hard drives to the trays. The trays also snap into the cage pretty easily, but they're not quite as secure as I'd like.
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Getting the video card and power supply in is business as usual. The perforated covers for the expansion slots use thumbscrews as expected, while there's actually a little bit of padding in the power supply bay to ease fan vibration. Nothing eventful to report here, though.
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Wiring up the DS2 is pretty standard, too. It's easy to make good use of the routing holes around the motherboard tray, but where Nanoxia goofs up a little is with the AUX 12V routing hole. This isn't the first time I've seen this happen in a case design, and it alternates between being irritating and amusing. Basically, the back of the hole is blocked off somewhat by the rail for replacing the side panel. You can fish the line through it, but you may need a bit of patience.
Unfortunately the side panel mounting system does continue to be an issue due to the less than ideal amount of space for cables behind the motherboard tray. Remember that because the side panels are padded we lose millimeters of space, and this is an area where any amount of space can help. Expect a bit of a struggle when you go to close up this section of your build.
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Sabresiberian - Thursday, February 14, 2013 - link
Seriously?You can buy a case today that will allow you to pop in a couple of high-end video cards without the need for even buying additional fans. A decade ago, you could hardly run one card without pulling off the side cover and setting up an external fan to blow into the case.
But case design is largely based on mainboard format, and the rest of the components that go into the build. Those haven't changed much in 20 years, so the appearance and function of cases is going to remain similar. How I'll agree with you is to say the ATX format isn't serving us well today (particularly those of us interested in building high-end rigs). No mainboard form factor advance is something of a limit to advances in case design.
Tech-Curious - Thursday, February 14, 2013 - link
Having recently assembled a build in a circa-2001 case that was collecting dust in my basement, I'm a bit torn. Tthere've been innumerable QoL advancements in case design; 120mm fans, more flexible fan mounting options, more general recognition of cable management, fewer hard edges, and so on and so forth.My old case works surprisingly well, but it was also an unusually expensive product at the time, and I searched high and low for it (and I don't even remember which company manufactured it). Even so, it's noisier than it needs to be simply because it uses 80mm fans. Cable management is nonexistent; I had to bundle up and toss every loose cable into the drive cages. I had to jury-rig my own fan filters.
As others have pointed out, there's only so much true innovation anyone can impose on the ATX standard. If I have one complaint about current-day cases, it's that they all seem to come with a bottom-mounted PSU, which is fine if you plan to place the box on a hard floor or on your desk, but even a well-filtered down-facing PSU makes me extremely nervous when I'm placing the computer on a carpeted floor. Call me paranoid, but I'd like more options there.
crimson117 - Thursday, February 14, 2013 - link
Dustin,I'm digging your reviews lately, but I really with you'd use an ATX sized motherboard instead of a mATX.
With an ATX motherboard in certain cases, it may be cramped / difficult to access:
- the SATA ports, when pushed up against the hard drive cage(s) (especially those mobos with SATA ports pointing sideways off the board)
- the front case header connectors on the motherboard, when pushed against the lower portion of a case
- the rear side of the 5.25" bays
Even if you continue testing with mATX for consistency, would you please consider temporarily placing an ATX motherboard in each case, taking a picture, and commenting on whether any issues arise compared to an mATX board?
crimson117 - Thursday, February 14, 2013 - link
*I really wish, not with. I don't have a lisp IRL.anynigma - Thursday, February 14, 2013 - link
I completely agree. With any case that fits an ATX motherboard, I want to know if I will have any issues with Sata cables and long graphics cards specifically, and everything crimson mentioned above as well.Dustin can you please follow up with an ATX space analysis, or as a bare minimum, a picture. as crimson describes above?
crimson117 - Thursday, February 14, 2013 - link
Especially in these enthusiast cases like the Phantom 630 - who would use an mATX board in that thing?niva - Thursday, February 14, 2013 - link
And here I was thinking if it won't fit an EATX I'm not interested. Very valid point, test the biggest possible board the case was designed to fit.Hrel - Thursday, February 14, 2013 - link
Agreed, mini boards are for "normal" people.Dustin Sklavos - Friday, February 15, 2013 - link
Part of the problem is that there's no major incentive to use an ATX board in general anymore. I have one in my desktop, but even if I used SLI I'd still only need four slots total. :|The clearance thing is admittedly worth considering. I'm not sure how well I can address this without trying to acquire an ATX board to test with, and then you have to keep in mind that some ATX boards are not as wide as others; meanwhile, our Micro-ATX board is actually *wider* than most mATX boards are. So when you're looking at the depth of the board and its proximity to the drive cages (including the side-oriented SATA connectors), that actually *is* what a conventional ATX board's clearance will be. Our mATX board is as deep as a standard ATX board.
I'm pretty sure you guys are going to chop my head off and crap down my neck when you see what I'm planning for my super high stress testbed, but a lot of this is a matter of using what will fit the widest number of builds and allow me to get the most testing done.
crimson117 - Friday, February 15, 2013 - link
I'm rockin' a Sonata III with the popular GIGABYTE GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3 (12" x 9.6") and it's nearly impossible to access the SATA ports due to the hard drive cages - especially while my modest 6850 GPU is installed.Sonata III is an old, tiny case, but that's where I"m coming from, anyhow.
>when you see what I'm planning for my super high stress testbed
Mini-ITX stapled into an engineering-sample 900D? ;-)