Lian Li PC-800B (cont’d)
To secure the hard drives, special screws are screwed into the drive so that it can be simply slide into position along the rails on the right side.
Once ready to go in, the dimensions of the case can again be appreciated, as there’s just enough space to get the hard drive completely in position before sliding it back. Installing two drives wouldn’t be any harder, and thankfully, the distance between the two isn’t too great that standard IDE cables can’t make it from one drive to the other.
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Since the power supply will cover up the connection point for our IDE cable, we decide to route that first.
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The next step is to secure the power supply mounting plate to our MadDog PSU, which is of course completely painless.
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Now, with everything else under the PSU in place, the power supply can be set in place. This is the only slightly tricky step in the setup of the PC-800, and even that isn’t really too bad, but some power supplies or motherboard configurations could make it more difficult than others. For instance, our modular unit makes the power cable routing after the PSU has been set in place much easier.
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Rather than having to punch out PCI slot covers, the PC-800’s are simply held in place by the same nice thumbscrews that one can use to hold down expansion cards. Installing our 6600GT video card was problem-free.
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After finishing the final connections to the two rear exhaust fans and front panel connectors, the build was complete and looked something like this:
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Tamale - Tuesday, November 22, 2005 - link
The 'POS' power supply happens to deliver steadier voltages to the highest-end gear I've gotten my hands on (and no, the P4 test bed isn't the most powerful thing I've tested it in) than anything else that's passed through my hands, and that includes over a dozen power supplies by high-end manufacturers. I'm no reviewer of power supplies yet, as we're still working on that, but I guarantee you that this is a fine unit, especially for the area of case reviews, because in quiet mode it does a fantastic job of staying silent enough to hear the case fans and still provides rock-solid voltages to a stressed-out system. It also gets warm when in quiet mode in the cases that don't ventilate the power supply well enough, which is another good measure of a case. Perhaps most important however is the modular nature of the unit, and even though I've tried other modular units none were as quiet as the MadDog.Secondly, the thermaltake golden orb II at full voltage is quieter than any of zalman's coolers at full voltage. While I understand that the zalman will probably get lower temperatures, It is absolutely essential that the CPU cooler in my test bed make as little noise as possible, and the golden orb II does just that.
The recurring theme in your post seems to me to be that you want 'the perfect HTPC', but the whole idea of a case review is to isolate everything but the case as much as possible, and sometimes hotter components do a better job of illustrating the deficiencies of units than the latest and greatest.
Trust me on this one, if we used the absolute best gear available the comparisons would be much muddier.
As for the subjective comment, my scale of 1-10 can be thought of as a scale of tolerance.. with 5 basically being the threshold... anything higher than that really is 'too loud for the given application' and anything lower than 4 is 'acceptable'. It's not meant to be a numerically accurate scale of any sort. I felt very comfortable with the final subject ratings I gave these cases, because the Tenor and PC-800B just barely passed my personal threshold test, and I believe most users will agree.
tayhimself - Tuesday, November 22, 2005 - link
I hope you realize other PSUs are likely quieter and more efficient than "Mad Dog". Sure the may be quiet to your ears, but thats too subjective to really mean anything. Sadly, you rate the modular nature as being an important issue when it is not. The PSU getting warm in quiet mode may be a sign of a PSU not getting enough airflow.And you say "its silent enough to hear case fans". While that can be true, the PSU and Tt golden orb noise signatures can drown out subtler differences between the cases in terms of noise of the case fans. This is almost obvious from your review as you dont perceive the difference of 9 dB to be significant. Its better to use quality quiet components so you can tell what the case is contributing to the noise spectrum. Since this is about making case buying decisions, the other factors are best isolated.
Avalon - Tuesday, November 22, 2005 - link
Get crackin'.mrgq912 - Tuesday, November 22, 2005 - link
to tired to read the article but first post.mrgq912 - Tuesday, November 22, 2005 - link
okay now that I have that out of my system. How come you guys never review stuff from alienware or voodoopc. Those guys make HTPC's aswell. I never every heard of the players in this review making HTPC's untill today. Well nice to know i have options.Would buy one if i could, untill then i will live with my ati tv wonder elite.
ksherman - Tuesday, November 22, 2005 - link
uh, cuz Alienware and Voodoo are over priced peices of DooDoo... and because this site is more geared around people that build their own machines...