The screws that hold the hard drives in place are inaccessible to anything but a magnetic screwdriver as they require being lifted about 3-4cm beyond the screw hole before you can get at them, they are also easily lost within the metal structure of the drive bay. The fan's cables itself (two of them, the 3-speed switch and the power cable) are trunked in a small metal channel that runs down the side of the drive bay. When you try and remove the cable from the trunking to remove the fan, the speed switch sticks out in several places and requires unjamming from both the front and the interior angles of the case with both hands - a very tricky 'working blind' job. To make matters worse, if the cable in this channel is even slightly misaligned when the drive bay is pushed back in, the side of the case will cut the wires off - this is how I managed to destroy both of the fans I did when using this case. It's generally best to try not to have to change the fans, it's just too difficult.
Owwwch. Quite bad design really, it was praised so much as the ultimate gamer case I remember. I'm watching a video of the 1200 and it really looks like an awesome case. A bit big though, I don't know anyone who would need 9 hard drives who doesn't have a server
The 1200 has many design improvements on the 900 that are shared in the 902. I just hope that the disk trays was one of them...
Haha, well they are all extremely easy to remove, all have dustfilters and fans and are convertible to 5.25 to 3.25, it doesn't really look fiddly either. A bit pricey though. Honestly I would rather go with a Tempest than this, it doesn't look like it has enough things that warrant it to have a high price.
That much was all true about the original. The NZXT Tempest and Antec 900/902 are essentially no different in design but for the fact that the NZXT has better cooling and fits more hard drives.
And the NZXT looks nicer in my opinion . I know quite a bit about building a PC now, most of my knowledge came from this forum, all I need to learn about now is Watercooling and different types of cooling, which I never have before. To go back on topic.. What's the difference between the 900 and the 902? Did they fix the Cable problem?
Cable problem? the main thing with the 902 is it's styled like the 1200. Sadly, they upped the price tag severely for that. Hehe, watercooling's an interesting area of conversation, one I advise that for your own sake, you don't look at.
I meant, did they fix the problems the 900 had you were talking about a minute ago. I think Antec as a company has gotten so much attention from gamers and blogs that they can just make any case and sell it, even if they bring out a 900 with an extra fan and up the price by £30. That's just my opinion though, they do make nice cases. I've seen some crazy cases for watercooling. I'm talking cases as tall as my desk. Tubes running through it and everything, it does look intersting and the results are obviously better than using air but it's rather fiddly isn't it? And expensive. I'm not much of an extreme overclocker so I probably won't
Glad someone else does . I'm trying not to go off-topic here but, are you planning on upgrading your PC soon? Maybe get a 5870x2 or something? Just curious. And I wonder how they're going to make the 5870x2's, seeing as how one card takes up 2 expansion slots, so an x2 must take up 4 maybe, I don't really know what's under the heatsink.
I'm as yet undecided. An upgrade certainly will happen, but I'm sticking it out for a bit to see what everything's going to be like. With the HD4000 series I had the benefit of happening across extremely cheap cards which were being sold off for charity ex-Driverheaven (one of the sites that reviews graphics cards) and thus one of the X2s in my PC right now is the very card that produced the crossfire benchmarks on their site. Assuming I won't be so lucky here, I'm playing it safe while prices are high, for several reasons: 1. The HD5870 is in limited supply period, thus prices are inflated 2. I can't actually afford any new hardware until mid October when I receive another loan payment 3. nvidia have yet to release a DX11 card, it could be better, or even if it isn't, it will still push prices down 4. The 5870X2 is not yet released, and I am almost certainly going to try for a 2-GPU card again in order to leave options open for another tri or quad graphics setup. 5. I want to perform a CPU upgrade in order to justify more graphics power. The core i5 and core i7 is my upgrade of choice, but as to which I'm not yet sure, because... 6. The first Lucid Hydra motherboard is due for release in a few weeks' time. This is potentially the answer I'm looking for as the Core i5 is better for games than the i7, but lacks in PCIe bandwidth - which the Ludic chip will solve. Better than that it could mean I can pair any two cards together. 7. I have lots of other hardware to buy with regard to storage and cooling, along with some console stuff - funds are reasonably limited this time around.
Wow, good job on the X2 . I wish the same could've happened to me. I also keep forgetting my (b)otherboard only has one PCI-E slot, so that's pretty crappy. It also only supports Core 2. I wish I could afford to get an i5 and a motherboard, but it's either Graphics Card and Case or Motherboard and CPU and Memory. And my 3850 is severly outdated. But I don't want to bottleneck my 5870, so I'll need to get a C2Q to balance it I guess. Computers are a Money Pit. I've never heard of the Lucid Hydra, I'll check it out.
That's just the rap, I have two full 16x bandwidth slots with my Core 2 board, which I actually lose if I go i5, unless I use a Hydra board, and how much performance do I really get? Only way to tell is to try really. I'm tempted to get a QX9650 off ebay and see how far I can clock that instead, as long as I can find a cheap one - I'm mainly limited by FSB speed since I run so much out of my motherboard (4 GPUs in particular take a heavy toll on that) so an unlocked multiplier will be very welcome in alleviating the CPU bottleneck. Trouble is, a QX9650 is likely to be £250-£300. An i5 750 with 4GB of DDR3 and a good motherboard is likely to only be £350, and if I get a QX9650, all I can sell is my old processor, whereas going i5 I can sell my old mobo and RAM as well - it might cost almost the same, and the i5 is certainly preferable - but what if I can't sell the old bits? :S
4GB Corsair XMS2 Dominator PC8500 (2x2GB). It'll be a while before I'm upgrading though, I'll make that quite clear, at least November, possibly even after christmas - also, unless you live in the UK, shipping won't be that cheap.
This might be a dumb question, but are they dual channel? And I thought you had mushkin :O? I live in London, so shipping should be fine, and same, I'll only buy the memory from you after I buy the 5870 and the case, which is New Year+. I'm a bit traumatized from memory though. I think I said before, I ordered 4GB Corsair memory, 1066MHz, it came (from ebuyer) very quickly in an envelope (memory ftw) but I was getting bluescreens. I'm using a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3 motherboard and the ram I used before was 2x1GB 800MHz Corsair XMS2 Dual Channel.. Got any ideas why that might've happened? It booted up fine, but I went to run Company of Heroes and it bluescreened after the second cutscene. It has never done this before. So I went to the bios and changed the voltage and reset the CPU to normal FSB and everything, same thing happened. I RMA'd it and they said it was faulty, but I never really did a Memtest on it. Maybe I was just extremely unlucky with the memory, but I'm still a little weary. Also, how much would you be willing to sell them for? EDIT - Also, when I turned the PC off, took the memory out and put the 2GB Dual Channel memory in (the one I already had) it wouldn't boot up. Maybe because the 4GB of ram I ordered wasn't dual channel and I put them in dual channel slots? I highly doubt that though, because Dual Channel memory can work in Single Channel mode...
Faulty memory can happen, but I've not tried using such high-speed memory in an older board, so I can't say for sure how reliable that is. Ebuyer often don't test RMAs (thankfully, as any intermittant faults are rejected by companies that do test) so them saying it was faulty is no 100% guarantee. I'm not disclosing a price here because trading is against the rules, and memory prices will change in the time between now and then.
Definitely, I was going to edit my post again but I thought you would've already read it and I didn't want to double post again . I guess we'll just have to talk again until new year. You have steam don't you? Well if you don't really feel comfortable here you could always add me, you don't have to though. Vader_GotSkill. I wish I had some 1066MHz memory to test..-_-. Because I need some fast memory so I can up my CPU from 3GHz to around 3.2ish, it really does make a difference on CounterStrike and other games/programs.
Counter Strike in particular is very CPU bound. I actually get the same performance with two 4870X2s as I did with my old HD3870 if I set my CPU speed the same...
