So, I’ve been looking at LinuxMCE - as I mentioned earlier - and have started getting the hardware together. I was planning on buying another Antec Sonata II - one of which I use in my games PC, and have been very impressed with - but I caved and bought an Antec 900, hoping the extra ventilation would keep the RAID cool.
My thoughts:
- It’s more expensive than a Sonata II, and doesn’t include a power supply. Having actually installed the motherboard, CPU, PSU etc. it’s not clear to me where the cost difference comes from.
- The Sonata II has drive rails, rubber standoffs (to acoustically isolate noisy hard drives, amongst other things), but the 900 has none. The 900 does have a couple of drive caddies, but these are nothing special. Seriously, the layout of the Sonata II is much better when it comes to installing hardware - exposed 5.25 inch drives pull straight out on rails, internal 3.5 inch drives are mounted sideways, so you can easily get to their connectors - and again they’re on rails. If you’ve worked on a decent server case you’ll know what I mean.
- Buy a power supply with extra-long cables. The 900 puts the PSU at the bottom of the tower; the motherboard I’m using puts the 4-pin bonus power connector at the top. It makes for a long cable run. There’s a 12cm fan next to the CPU to pull air from it – two if you install one in the mount on the side – but that’ll generate extra noise, over and above the existing PSU.
- The 20cm fan on top of the case is quiet, and pulls a lot of air, but the other fans still make a fair bit of noise - and if you disable them, you’ll need to block the gaps in the case. All four default fans in the case have three-setting speed controls.
It might make a good gaming case, if you’ve got some sort of over-clocked SLI’d fire-breathing neon monster - but you’d have to put up with a fair bit of noise from the airflow, and there’s no filter (unlike the Sonata II) to stop it inhaling dust, carpet etc.
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