The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

Only on the top/bottom, not on the side, and that's what I was criticising.
There's a rather limited range of decent 140mm fans, whereas with 120mm you're free to use almost any brand you choose, so I consider a mount not supporting 120mm fans when it easily could a design flaw.

It may come with a fan controller, but it's one of those awful bracket types that fits in a PCI bay. Most people place their PCs in a position where getting down to components situated in the rear PCI brackets is not easy, thus, such fan controllers never get used.
Far from everyone needs a front bay fan controller, but a case not catering for a possible need is obviously not as good (in that aspect) as one that does. It will just be a moot point for you personally, since this particular issue doesn't matter to you.

For your needs, the case is "better" solely because it's cheaper, perhaps also for its native 8 3.5" bay support, although I wasn't aware of you using that many drives in your main PC. Considering it overall as a product, however, it's cheaper than the Corsair for a reason.

 

Ya your right the side fan is limited and definitely 120mm fans gives you a better selection to choose from, 140mm good fans are far and few. And you're right I typically don't use that many HDD's in my main PC but I probably will use this to upgrade one of my gaming PC's and there it might work better as I'll also take advantage of the water cooling feature. With that in mind I may also look at an Intel platform and get the ASUS 8 memory slot mainboard so that I can load some high performance games on a virtual drive in RAM.

Again I was just pulling your chain Sam as I would rather have the Corsair case Russ has too, but do not want to spend a Franklin for it.

That fan controller I would mount in the front if I was to use it and not use the rear slot for it. Like you I think that is a stupid solution for a controller. And that controller isn't thermally controlled just manually so even if one wanted a fan controller that certainly wouldn't be what they were looking for.

 

Manual fan controllers have an advantage over most automatic fan controllers as they're easily adjustable. I'm all for automatic fan controllers, but usually only if they offer parametric adjustment. Otherwise you may as well have a full speed fan in many cases as automatic controllers all-too-often ramp up far too early, motherboard CPU fan connectors are a prime example of this.

 

The one I use to have was as it didn't ramp up fast but you are totally right about some automatic controllers you might as well just use your motherboard or go to a manual adjusting controller.

 

I was lusting after the AquaComputer AquaAero units a while back, they're designed with water-cooled systems in mind, but seem to offer superfluous fan control utilities. Couldn't justify the price at the time though. Still can't!

 

I certainly love my manual Scythe fan controller. I use it frequently. I have a 1500, 1400, 1300Rpm configuration running at the moment. I guess I could drop it to 12 - 1300. But the noise it puts off at the moment, is negligible to me And ramping each 150Rpm when encoding isn't much noisier. I'm quite pleased with my Setup. Though I could see putting quad 120mm fans on the side panel down the road Something I'll probably experiment with later. If I end up getting a Piledriver, I'll probably update the cooling scheme. While it's adequate, I'm sure I could greatly improve it.

 

Stevo,

I was pretty sure you were pulling Sam's chain. I had no difficulty in finding two serious faults with the Fractal case. It's nice that the case has 8 HDD bays, in two sections of 4. What isn't so nice is that if you remove a section because you need the room for say a longer video card, you lose 4 potential HDD's, or maybe even existing ones. Now it becomes a 6 bay case! They just didn't think it through long enough! The real major problem is the cover fan location. It looks good, but it's totally useless! They need to put the fan where it directs it's air, where the heat is, so why is it in the middle of the case cover, instead of over the top left third of the motherboard, where it can do some good, cooling the Northbridge and the VRM's!

I also take exception to Fractals total disregard for the truth in strongly implying that this case is for an 8 port motherboard, when clearly it is not! 7+1 is not the same as 8! In this case the +1 is vertical, and is nothing more than a breakout panel! It's a nice enough looking case, but the design is antiquated. I think the design of the Corsair is brilliant!

EDIT:

Here you go, a 400R for $59.99 after $20 instant, and $20 MIR.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-Details.asp?EdpNo=684760&sku=C13-6400

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Debacled 1st point
No you don't loose the 2nd 4 HHD bay as it inserts 90 deg out to gain the extra space. You would only loose one 4 drive bay if they made a much longer video card then is even made today.

2nd point
It's not advertised as a 8 I/O slot motherboard case. The 8th slot, that is horizontal, is for the fan controller potentiometer, and only that controller.

Although that case you show is nice I still like this case much better. I don't need/want the extra ROM bays as I won't use them and I prefer the split drive bays that can be oriented facing back for better airflow or toward the side case cover for convenience. I personally think that is a way better design feature and I get two more drive bays that are all compatible for 3.5" or 2.5" drives.

So I wouldn't worry about the 8th slot as I have yet to see a 8 slot I/O motherboard these days, and your misunderstanding of the drive bays doesn't support the poor design structure that you would like to knock it for, that just doesn't hold up. Now Sam's arguments I at least understand from his prospective.

Thanks,
Stevo

 

There are quite a few motherboards intended for cases with eight expansion slots. For example, Gigabyte's Z77 Sniper E-ATX board has eight slots (four double spaced PCIe 3.0 x16 slots with a PLX chip for quad PCIe 3.0 x8 Crossfire/SLI, ideally with water cooled cards).

 

There are not quite a few, there maybe a couple, I've done my home work on this, most ATX boards, MOST, are 7 or 6 slots (normal spacing)!

 

Tht's probably because you're talking about only ATX boards. There are plenty of E-ATX boards or other such form factors, many of which have eight slots. I'm not aware of any ATX board with eight slots. I think that would be outside of the ATX specifications for motherboards.

 

Stevo,

This is the nomenclature that was supplied to Newegg by the case manufacturer, exactly as written!

Steel ATX Mid Tower
1 x USB 3.0, 2 x USB 2.0, and Audio I/O ports Front Ports
Side Air duct
2 (with one 5.25 > 3.5 inch converter included) External 5.25" Drive Bays
8 (Compatible with SSD) In

I don't know what you make of that last line, but it definitely is trying to mislead you. How is the vertical slot in any way compatible with SSD?

Russ

 

vcuongpx,

Welcome to AD!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Oman7,

I've been thinking about that question, since I read this post. It may have a lot to do with the chipset, and the best chipset to have is the 990/950. It was silly easy to overclock, once I realized that any voltage bumps would be very small, it was easy. It's very finicky until you understand the narrower range. I just bumped it up to 3.925GHz at 1.312v.



It took another 3 minutes off of the same video I encoded yesterday at 3.8GHz.

Here's some benchmarks! The processor arithmetic went up 3000 MIPS and the memory didn't change







I've never seen Processor Multi Media scores that high before. I'm going to go ahead and use it for a couple of days and see how it goes. If all is good, on to 4.0GHz

Best Regards,
Russ

 

It didn't mislead me nor do I think it mislead Sam, who would have brought that up, and it still doesn't support your poor design argument. Actually it is a very good design, quite the opposite of what you were saying was bad.


Blazorthon,
You're absolutely correct I was speaking of ATX and not extended in which you're right the 8 slots might be needed, depending of course on if the motherboard had a PCIe 16x slot in the first position and not a 1x slot which wouldn't be the end of the world to loose and is more so the common case.

 

Mr-Movies says, "It didn't mislead me nor do I think it mislead Sam, who would have brought that up, and it still doesn't support your poor design argument. Actually it is a very good design, quite the opposite of what you were saying was bad."

Stevo,

I don't recall ever saying the fractal was a bad case! I said it was an "antiquated design". I would call it a throw back to the past.

The nomenclature from Fractral says,
"Supports graphics card lengths up to 290mm when removable HDD cage is in place and up to 470mm with upper HDD cage removed"

Notice it says the word removed. There's no mention of rotating it for more room, only removing it. That's why I said what I said about the design. I can tell you why the cover fan is located where it is. If it were in the right place, you couldn't get a lot of air coolers to fit inside the narrowness of a 9" wide case. There's still a lot of good coolers that aren't going to fit!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

How is rotating drive cages antiquated? And how many OLD cases have split bays that are removable and can utilize any drive made in a non-server case? Also you needed to view the video that NewEgg supplies to see the features of this case as it is advanced in its style with all sorts of features other cases don't have.

Again, had you viewed the video you would have found out that only video cards with extreme lengths, that are NOT presently made, could be accommodated in this case. Again a design feature other cases, even the one you use don't possess!

Plain and simple your arguments are just flat out wrong!

Sorry but true,
Stevo

 

From the official spec sheet, located here:

http://www.fractal-design.com/?view=product&prod=57

"Upper HDD cage is removable and rotatable"
"Supports graphic card lengths up to 290mm when removable HDD-Bay is in place
Supports graphic card lengths up to 470mm without removable HDD-Bay"

The HD6990 measures 305mm in length, so would not fit in the case with the upper HDD unit in place, so the statement that no graphics card yet in existence will not fit in this scenario is false.
It is however, accurate to state that graphics cards exceeding 290mm in length are relatively rare - the HD5970, HD6970 and GTX690 all come in at 11", or 279mm, so they'll fit albeit a little tight. Whether you want the rear of a massive graphics card that close to your hard drives is another matter, but with a standard front-to-rear radial cooler design (c.f. the large axial heatsink based system used on many high-end non-reference cards) I don't see an issue with it.

From this, there are no unusual downsides to the case beyond those I initially stated a page ago. The hard disk cages are almost a non-issue except when using the largest graphics cards and to be honest, that sort of card does not necessarily belong in such an inexpensive case anyway.

 

I just repeated what the video said so I was not aware of a graphics card at 305mm, and apparently the reviewer wasn't either, as I haven't researched that nor do I own that video card but a very good point.

However I disagree that you have to have an expensive case to have a gaming rig and this case has all of the cooling needs to support such a rig so I think you're wrong there Sam.

Another thing you missed is you can rotate the drive cages for better cooling which I touched on previously so they don't rotate or remove just for the purpose of adding a large video card or whatever.