* Probably not, though.

So we have a box in the living room that can do these wondrous things (and more besides, but we’ll stick to mainly watching non-stolen telly programs for now) but the control system is a little lacklustre. The typical coffee table might have a couple of remotes on it (these days probably about seven of the buggers) but a fully fledged keyboard and mouse look a little out of place and don’t leave much room for all your super stylish “I’m hip” coffee table books you never read. No, what you need is a remote control (yup another one!) for your PC. And, wouldn’t you just know it, we’re about to take a look at two available models right now.

Microsoft MCE Remote

This is probably the most prolific remote out there, and that’s probably because it says “Microsoft” on it and gets sold with Dell PCs (maybe?). It’s also a pretty good remote, if a mite ugly in a garishly “Beko” kind of way. I hope the silver plastic era of home entertainment stops soon, it’s getting a bit much. Anyhoo enough of my blabbering; pictures!

As you can see it’s fairly nicely laid out. All the major stuff (we’re talking play, pause, stop, all that guff) is up the top there and the play button’s extra big so your fat thumb can find it more easily. Below the playback controls there’s a neat four-way directional thing with an OK button in the middle. This mimicks the similar controls found on DVD players, which is fairly handy and not too surprising. Below that arrangement is a big green button with a Windows logo on it (they had to cram one in somewhere). This button is designed with Microsoft’s Windows Media Center Edition [it's spelt "Centre", chaps, we invented the language so I'm pretty sure we're right...] software and is as far as I can tell used to turn it all on. More typical buttons surround it – volume up/down, channel up/down and a mute button. We then have four shortcut buttons to “Recorded TV”, “Guide”, “Live TV” and “OSD Menu”. Again these tie into Windows MCE.

The bottom half of the control, in that hugely attractive recessed area (..), contains a big number pad that I can’t imagine much use for* and some other buttons that make it look like an old teletext TV remote.

Overall the MCE remote isn’t a hugely attractive or exciting prospect but it’s arranged pretty well and it’s got everything you’d imagine needing to control some kind of amazing media centre program on your computer (a bit more on that later). Oh, and it lights up! Which is obviously bonus points.

* oh yeah, changing channels :$

Logitech UltraX Media Remote

This is much less common than the MCE (at time of writing) and according to the Logitech website it doesn’t even exist. Freaky. But since I don’t remember travelling forwards in time and stealing it from a government research laboratory I must come to the conclusion that this is available from retail outlets in the United Kingdom right now.

If you ask me, it’s much much more stylish than Microsoft’s “my first remote” offering. In plain matt black with a super shiny strip up the middle it certainly looks like a remote control for some “proper” equipment and so if you put it on your coffee table you might want to hide the remote for your Goodmans stereo system from view. It’s also littered with buttons, which unfortunately means I have more stuff to write down.

At the top we have all the various functions that tie into the software Logitech send you (called “MediaLife”) – TV, DVD, FM RADIO (?), PICTURES, VIDEOS and MUSIC – they’re all in capitals on the remote so I didn’t want to change the impact they have by using lower case. There are also three more buttons on the very top row – START, HOME and CLOSE… fairly intuitive I feel.

We then have the ubiquitous number pad, followed by volume and mute controls and then the DVD style up/down/left/right/ok navigation buttons. After those we get the playback controls, again with thumb friendly massive play button. The shuttle buttons are rather stylish I feel, but the record button and stop button are almost dangerously close and similar. Just below are the channel up/down buttons. Also note the lack of any backlighting, which is clearly going to lose the Logitech ground against MS’s luminous efforts.

The final section has some proper function buttons.

BACK, DVD MENU, ANGLE, SAP (satellite?), LAST:CH, LANGUAGE, REPEAT, INFO/EPG, SUBTITLE, SHUFFLE, CC/TELETEXT.

These are real functions like on real remotes, much more impressive than a green Windows logo button. This almost makes up for the lack of LEDs. Almost.

How they compare

There are major differences between the two remotes beside one being silver and the other being black. The MS remote is an IR (infra-red) device, like a normal remote. It has a receiver which you have to put on top of your TV or on the VCR or something and then you have to point the remote at it to make it do things. The receiver plugs into a USB port and has a stupidly long cable so locating it should be easy. There’s also two plugs on the back and two extra IR thingies – these ones are just a little diode and as far as I’m aware these are meant to point at your other equipment so they can send info to them. Why the remote can’t send that info itself I don’t know, I’m not sure I believe in this.

The Logitech remote uses RF – that’s like radio to you and me – which means there’s no pointing to be done, the remote sends the commands through magic and the receiver picks them up after they’ve passed through everyone in the rooms brains and done some kind of damage no-one yet understands. This is good in a way because there’s no receiver box to position or hide and, erm, you don’t have to point it at the TV. I suppose you could even control it from another room, which if you had some clever setup whereby the PC was upstairs or in a cupboard or something would be pretty awesome for you. The USB receiver is TINY so don’t accidentally eat it.

Both remotes worked as soon as I plugged them in, which for someone like me who remembers changing config.sys files to make commander keen work with sound is AMAZING. In a normal windows environment however both controls are fairly useless. I just hit some buttons and I could scroll up and down in notepad with them and even use the numberpad – 140665 – see? Apart from fantastic things like that though there’s no real use for the remote until you load up the right software. In my case, that means MediaPortal.

MediaPortal is awesome. It’s very alike Windows Media Center except that it has a rather drastically different price – it’s free. It’s been very stable for me, plays my media accross my wireless network reasonably well (the occasional jump but I blame my £10 wireless USB crapstick), runs DVDs beautifully and boots up pretty quick too. I don’t use any of it’s PVR functions but it does sport a pretty impressive set of them. For the purpose of this little test, MediaPortal could be replaced with whatever your preferred interface – top ones seem to be Meedio, GB-PVR, MediaPortal and Windows MCE. Whether or not the controllers do the exact same things in each program, however, is uncertain.

Plug and play

Without doing anything at all, just having the remotes plugged in, both perform quite remarkably well in MediaPortal. This might be to do with the amazingness of the programmers or even the gradual standardisation of controls for most applications, but the fact that these things work at all straight out of the box is really quite astounding. Navigating menus is a doddle using the joystick-style directional controls, and skipping through episodes of 24 to miss out all the annoying crap in between explosions was super-easy using both remotes. Fast forward buttons perform as you would expect, and skipping through with the directional buttons works flawlessly too.

MediaPortal supports the MCE remote and you can “turn it on” in it’s setup program. The Logitech isn’t in there but as we’ve already established it works anyway. Installing MediaLife was an all together much less fantastic experience. The software first steals association with DVDs (which is always immeasurably annoying, especially when you have everything set up as you like it). Once running, it crashed within about five minutes. I realise I should have kept on with it but really first impressions are all important and it didn’t impress me at all. I’ve learnt not to bother installing software that comes with hardware anyway, installing MediaLife was just a lapse of my “rules” in the interests of science. Never again.

Back to MediaPortal then, and some unfortunate shortcomings for the Logitech control. These, though, I suspect are the softwares fault and not that of the remote. There are certain things that don’t make a huge amount of sense in MP, one of them is that hitting back repeatedly when watching a film navigates back through the menus and puts the video into a small screen. Getting the video maximised again with a keyboard is easy – the X key – and is equally simple with a mouse – click on it. But with both remotes it proved tricky. I eventually discovered through extensive research (yes, I just pressed everything until something happened) that the RED button on the MCE remote does the same as the X key – flicks between full screen and thumbnail. Unfortunately no key on the Logitech remote is mapped to do that as default. I also discovered that none of the awesome DVD buttons work in MP. Hitting DVD MENU is rewarded by absolutely nothing happening – similarly for subtitles and languages. I suspect the ANGLE button does nothing too, but I don’t have any of those “specialist” DVDs that tend to make use of that feature.

The MCE remote however behaves impeccably well in MP. Everything can be controlled from the remote with no need to ever pull the keyboard out from behind the TV set. You can even turn the PC off from the remote and I suspect, with some techy wizardryness, you could turn it on from the remote as well (might need a couple of BIOS tweaks). I feel that if MP supported the Logitech remote some of the additional functions might be mapped by default. The MCE is only able to do the more clever bits like the MP menus and whatnot when it’s “turned on” in the MP configuration. Hopefully someone will write a plugin or I’ll figure out how to set it up manually.

Which one is better then?

Well… as much as it pains me to say… for pure functionality and compatibility (with MP at least, although I think it’s safe to say with MCE as well) the Microsoft remote wins. It’s so easy to use; I gave it to my Dad, who has complained about the PC in the living room ever since it arrived, and he was instantly overjoyed at how simple it was. The fact that the keyboard controls were pretty much the same is neither here nor there – the familiar feel of a remote control in the hand is what really made the difference, and he was flipping through Arrested Development episodes within seconds.

The Logitech is a much more professional looking device and for me represents the better product. But as happens so often, the better product simply doesn’t have the support to perform. As soon as there’s a plugin for MediaPortal I’ll be a very happy man. But for now the media PC downstairs uses the Microsoft MCE controller and the Logitech is resigned to use up here for the occasional Media Player outing.

Both great products, the MCE has the edge in software support.

Oh, and MediaLife sucks. In case you’re interested, it seems to be an even less capable version of CyberLink Power Cinema.

MCE
Works perfectly
Cheap (OEM)
IR sender thingies for your sky+ box
It’s MS, so it’ll probably work with Windows stuff
Looks tacky (I mean, really, ugh)
IR, so no wall-hacking action
It’s Microsoft, so you lose geek points with your nerd mates

UltraX
Looks sexy
Blends in better with other equipment
Even cheaper (OEM)
RF, so works through walls
Very compact receiver
Plenty of buttons
The plentiful buttons don’t actually do anything
Bundled software is dire
No support for MP (yet)

Related:
MediaPortal
MCE 2005
Meedio
GB-PVR

Second opinion:
automatedhome.co.uk – mainly just pictures though.

Back in the old days a case was just a box you plonked the computer in. Now it’s an integral part of your cooling system as well, and this one is trying something a bit new. Luckily, and importantly, it also looks rather natty.

Enermax are no stranger to the scene. They’ve been producing top flight power supplies for yonks and have tried there hand at case design on a few occasions too. This, the CS-718 released under the company’s “Coolergiant” alias, marks (in my eyes) their first proper entry into the high end case market.

The looks take a lot of ideas from other cases, but the mix is fairly unique… the mesh is clearly inspired by the recent Apple G5 cases and the millions of copies that followed, but it is used in a different way – only a small slither on the front panel, surrounded by shiny brushed metal. The top of the front panel houses a small LCD display and a number of connections (usb / sound / firewire) – reminiscent of the Antec P160 case but again done in a slightly different way.

Down at the bottom of the front panel is a great big knob (fnaar fnaar) used to control the internal cooling tunnel (which we’ll get into soon). The side panels are plain old boring steel, but you might be a little confused at first and take off the wrong one since the case follows a pseudo-BTX layout much like the recent Lian Li V-series cases.

So it looks as if the designers at Enermax had one of each manufacturers recent top cases and tried to take away all the best parts of each and meld them with their own chassis basics. Perhaps not the most noble method of design, but a fairly clever way to go.

Moving to the insides you can’t help but straight away notice the big blue plastic duct. This connects two 120mm fans, one front one back, and is designed to force a whole load of air across the CPU area (thus exhausting all the hot air from the CPU cooler). Whilst this seems like a fairly good idea, I do wonder whether the forced airflow hinders the performance of the CPU fan. With the volume of air, though, I would think performance will still be greater than the performance of the CPU cooler alone in the same position. We’ll test that later on.

The vent has two interchangable “hoods” for different board layouts. I’m using a standard ATX board and the CPU fits fairly nicely into the bottom right hand corner… some newer boards or dual boards might place a CPU in this “hooded” section and might need the extra clearance afforded by the extended version. The flat version is there in case the other fouls some components. I don’t have a big ol’ pile of boards to test with, but it’s nice to see a couple of options available.

The hoods clip onto the tunnel with plastic clips and the tunnels clip in to the case using a similar idea. It’s all nice and simple but seems pretty secure.

The use of 120mm fans here is a great thing – 120mm fans will give much a better performance:noise ratio than their 80mm counterparts. We also have a mount for an optional additional 80mm fan on the front panel, but no fan is shipped with the case. For purists wanting airflow balance, a fan here could partner the exhaust fan in the PSU.

Moving back to the exterior of the case, and up to the top, we can have a better look at the external ports and LCD display. 4 USB ports are provided, a welcome increase from the usual 2 ports on most cases, as well as a single firewire (good for any budding video editors) and a mic and headphone socket. I’ve never been a huge fan of front mounted ports like these but I have to admit I found the USB ports extremely useful for things like my joystick, recently rescued from the cupboard for a quick blast at the Battlefield 2 demo, and my camera’s card reader. The headphone and mic sockets seem the least useful but I guess someone must like them as they seem fairly ubiquitous on cases nowadays.

The LCD display shows the current speed of the 120 mm fans controlled by the speed dial at the front of the case as well as the temperature inside the case measured by it’s own sensors. I should note that the speed is only measured from the front 120mm fan… logic would dictate that at the same voltage the fans would run at the same speed but if the back one stops running the lcd won’t tell you.

There’s also a graphical display of the temperature in the shape of a thermometer, and the temperature can be switched from celcius/centegrade to farenheit using the buttons next to the screen. The buttons (including reset and power) all have a lovely tactile feel to them and appear to be either metal or very high quality painted plastic – they don’t look tacky like so many other manufacturers’ buttons do (even the buttons on my Lian Li PC60 are fairly cheap and nasty).

The fans can be adjusted from a near-silent 1500 rpm to a not-much-noisier (but definitely noticeable) 4000 rpm. Changing the fan speed did have a measurable effect on my cpu temperatures, although in this recent hot weather there’s not much you can do – blowing hot air over something slower or faster hardly makes a lot of difference to cooling it down. I saw differences of up to 3 or 4 degrees when running the fans at top speed which is nothing to sneer at. To be honest though I prefer the serenity provided by the lowest setting – the cooling setup within this case really is very quiet indeed (my CPU cooler is an Akasa 824 with an 80mm Noiseblocker UltraSilent fan attached).

The fans are not hard wired to the control knob, they are connected to a rather natty little pcb, so you could use your own fans or even connect more since there are two spare 3-pin plug spaces. A nice touch.

There is a major downside to the wind tunnel arrangement, and that’s DUST. Dust, dust and yet more dust gets sucked through the tube and most of it collects on the front panel, heatsink and anything else in it’s way. Obviously dust is always a problem for forced airflow systems, but it seemed particularly bad in this case. The small-hole mesh on the front panel doesn’t help matters – dust clings to it readily – and the square mesh on the inner front panel behaves similarly. Inside the tunnel dust sticks to the plastic which presumably gains some static properties from the constant rushing air and is also pushed through the heatsink.

A filter system at the intake, perhaps with wider mesh over the intake area (?), could have cut down this problem hugely, perhaps eliminated it, and is something Enermax should definitely consider introducing if they use this design in a future product. It worked wonders in the Lian Li PC60 case series, and the easy access to the inner front panel in this case would make getting at a filter to clean it very easy indeed.

Despite it’s dust-friendly properties the black mesh used on the front panel is fairly gorgeous. And actually it’s not too difficult to clean, especially some help from a friendly vacuum cleaner. It gives a very industrial feel, especially where you can see the chassis through it like you can at the 3.5″ bay area. The big fan control knob is also pretty swish, but isn’t held in as securely as it could be and thusly wobbles a bit when you turn it which feels a bit cheap. Nobody’s perfect, I suppose.

The drive bay covers are attached to the front door-panel by tiny screws on the reverse side, 2 holding each panel in place. The door will not close with drives installed due to the clips being aligned so that the drives fit flush with the door panel. It wouldn’t be very easy to modify unfortunately, since I think the drives would look nice hidden behind this black mesh.

There are bigger problems though. The hard disk rack looks at first glance to be an excellent provision. The hard disks slide in on their sides using some rather clever clips which don’t require *any* screws at all – they clip onto the disks using metal tabs, then slide smoothly but tightly into the rack. Excellent… and yet really not clever at all. The disks take up pretty much the whole width of the case, leaving only a small gap on the far side for cables and the like. Power cables are fine, but there is an issue with IDE cables. Given the profusion of round IDE cables in systems these days, including my own, you’d think case makers would realise that some space is required behind drives for the bend radii of the cables. Rounded cables, if connecting to more than one drive, simply do not fit in this case.

Majorly annoying – and the only flat cables I have wouldn’t reach the pretty long distance round to the ports on the motherboard. Quite a mishap there on Enermax’s part. A bit of butchering to a rounded cable (removing the boots and/or some sleeving) could get them to fit but it really shouldn’t be something a new case buyer needs to do.

Back to those drive bay clips/rails… a similar method is used for the 5.25″ drives, again needing no screws at all. The clips are really quite clever and something I haven’t seen before. 4 metal tabs fit into the standard screwholes present on *all* drives – 2 on the bottom 2 on the side on both the left and right of the drive. Once the bottom tabs are in, you “rock” the clip so that the remaining tabs find their way into the side holes.

Then the clip is secure, and you can slide it into the drive bay where it clicks securely into place. Great stuff. The only problem these things pose, which is the same for other cases using rails and clips, is that short items like fan controllers and things like that aren’t long enough to fit into the clips properly. Usually these items will be secure enough just using the front holes, since the sides of the bay will push against the clip and hold it firmly into whatever product it is. It’s a limitation to the system, but only usually a minor annoyance rather than a full on problem. As someone who usually favours the traditional 4-screws approach, I was fairly impressed by these clips and rails.

Continuing the tool-less theme, the expansion cards have their own peculiar system to oust the evil screws. Here black plastic clips fold down to clamp the cards in place. Now, these I really do not like. They’re simply not strong enough for heavy cards (my radeon with attached hugely-heavy Arctic Cooler didn’t feel very secure) – I would have much preferred to see some more traditional but still damned easy-to-use thumbscrews here.

A power supply was included with the case sent to me for review – Enermax makes some really top notch PSUs so it makes sense that they should include one in their cases as added value. The unit included is of decent specifications – 460W according to the label, and model number EG-465AX-VE(G)(24P). There’s plenty of connectors of all kinds as one would expect from an Enermax supply – it seems to be one of their pretty expensive models which definitely adds value to the product as a whole – buying one separately would cost around £50 or more. I’m told the case will ship like this.* (see ‘related’ section at the end of the article)

The unit has 2 80mm fans with a rheostat (for fan speed control) on the rear. In the slowest position the noise is almost undetectable. It has a 20/24 pin motherboard connector. In many respects it’s a lot like the Coolergiant model I tested recently, only without the blower fan arrangement.

Hurry up…

There are a few other bits I’ve not mentioned that I’ll quickly cover before bringing this review to a close. The case features one of those “case open” switches that you’ve always seen in your BIOS but never used. It’s just a microswitch that gets depressed (awh) when the case panel is secured. A feature some might find useful, although I can’t see why.

A comprehensive set of screws was included with my sample case. I can only assume this is a standard inclusion with any retail case as well.

The case comes packaged in the traditional plastic bag, foam spacers, cardboard box method – decent and secure.

The front door has a lock on the side, with two keys supplied. This might be useful in stopping little tykes pulling your optical drive out.

The case is available on most websites in either all-over black or all-over silver. I haven’t seen this strange hybrid that I was sent on sale anywhere (answers on a postcard?). In my opinion the pure black version is the sexiest of the bunch.

Conclusion

So there we have the CS-718. How do we summarise things? It’s certainly a striking case… imposing even – at 54cm tall (~1’9″) you certainly won’t lose it. The attractive use of painted mesh contrasted with brushed metal gives it a rather dashing appearance which should make quite an impact, and the bright blue LCD panel and glowing fans give it an eerie, almost menacing, prescence in a darkened room. Internally things are fairly capable… plenty of room for drive expansion (albeit with a very poorly designed restriction on cables) and lots of space in the main area to work with when installing a system or upgrading.

And yet even with all this space, the cables and thin sensor wires, front panel connector wires, and power lines all conspire to make this a very messy case. squeezing cables through gaps to get round to the hard disks, cramming the rather lengthy spare power cables into a spare nook, and working around that large plastic cowl can make things a bit claustrophobic – and it’s never good to be stressed when tinkering with expensive yet delicate equipment.

The motherboard tray is fixed in place which isn’t unusual in such a large case as this but is still irritating with the strides that have been made in case design. The included power supply makes a welcome break from the norm and it’s high quality comes as even more of a shock. The internal cooling system is also well thought out, and the innovative duct system has benefits which outweigh it’s minor flaws (the main issue being dust build up).

Enermax have done a decent job, but have some little niggles to work on. All said and done this is a very capable case and something most geeks would be proud to display in all it’s menacingly large glory on their desks next to a big old widescreen TFT. For the more average user I think it might be a little bit ‘overkill’, and the difficulty in routing cabling around the slightly muddled interior – something which might seem a rewarding challenge to the more enthusiastic computer user – might put off Joe Public. Or Joe Modder’s dad.

A good push into the high-end market with some interesting ideas, the next one they make should be great.

…just a nice montage of pictures and a “this is great” or “this is suck” summary

This case is… ok

Good looks
Decent size
Good psu supplied
Good cooling system
Nice clip/rail system
Front ports and LCD display
Dusty (no filters)
Crap hard disk rack
Internals can get a bit messy with wires
Expensive
Heavy

Related:
Enermax UK
OcUK online store, £116 inc vat at time of writing (NO PSU)
pixmania online store, £131 inc vat at time of writing (NO PSU)
* Seems it’s not so common for a PSU to be included afterall… there goes the “added value”

Second opinion:
overclockercafe.com – Recommended
The case is big and heavy which is good or bad depending on your needs or uses for the case. I didn’t like the fact that it did not have a removable mainboard tray but the inverted mainboard design made up for this in usable work space. All things considered, the Enermax CS-718 is a fine server case that you will be hard pressed to dislike and should be at the top of anyone’s list who is looking for a server box with style and function.

AMDreview.com – 3/10
I believe the reason the case got so hot is because the only exhaust fans are the 120mm in the wind tunnel, and the power supply. All the hot air from the case rises up through the hard drives heating them up. I think this is a serious design flaw; they could probably get the case cooler by including an extra exhaust fan or two.

3dvelocity.com – Recommended
The understated design is accentuated with a bit of bling by using LED fans which are visible through the mesh bezel. Aside from the lack of easy access to the HSF (or removable motherboard tray), I have no gripes at all about this case. From a quality of build standpoint, and attention to detail, I can recommend this case to those of you planning your next speed demon. One minor drawback to the wind tunnel, however, is that many of the newer, larger heat pipe HSFs will not fit.

The evolution of waterblock design has been to eek as much cooling performance from systems as possible without introducing brute force methods like bigger radiators or faster, louder, cooling fans. A while back I took a look at the Alphacool NexXxoS Pro HP block which, back then, became a pretty popular arse kicker. Here we’ll have a look at a new block with a big ambition: to beat the HP and its peers.

The “Masterfreezer 1″ (or “M-I”, roman numberal fans) is probably not a block you’ve heard of. At first I found it hard enough to figure out who the thing’s made by, and I’ve GOT one. Manufacturer LICS (“Liquid Ice CubeS”) is based in Germany, as are so many of the mainstays in this particular industry, and don’t sell a lot of their waterblocks in England (yet). As with many of the German brands (we’re talking Alphacool, Aqua-Computer, Innovatek et al) a lot of their product range looks very similar to that of their competitors (see this for example). The Master Freezer doesn’t directly resemble any of the other blocks out at the moment however so I was rather interested to have a look at it.

Available in all the usual flavours (sktA, 478, 775, 754, 939, 940 and 603, 604 variants of the clip exist) the block is of a fairly traditional design. Full flow inlets and outlets, no silly spray nozzles here, force the maximum amount of water possible through parallel channels cut into the copper base. A tried and tested method, and leaving out the [gimmicky?] jet nozzles takes this particular block back to basics. The thin copper base, with the neatly cut grooves, is topped by a big brass lump into which the tapped holes for the barbs have been drilled. The block itself is a neat compact square, meaning clearance problems should be non-existant for most boards as the larger clamping assembly sits a good half inch away from the motherboard. The clip has holes cut to correspond with the mounting holes in the boards for all of the above cpu sockets – pretty clever stuff. A ZIF hold-down is also available. Let’s get going.

Specifications:

Dimensions: 50 x 50 mm top, 18 mm height
Weight: approx 540g
Connector threads: 1/8″ inlet and outlet
Compatibility: AMD Athlon Socket 462 (A), Intel Pentium 4 Socket 478, 775, AMD Athlon 64 / Opteron 754, 939, 940, Intel XEON Socket 603, 604
Material: Copper base, brass top

At 500-odd grams this M-I is a heavy beast even by heatsink standards. That’ll be the brass then. With the good strong hold-down and the small size of the block I wouldn’t worry about transportation issues as is often made a big-deal of with heavy traditional heatsinks.

The brass top is beautifully crafted and polished, almost as impressive as the super-shiny copper base which certainly wouldn’t require any lapping after purchase. A lovely smooth base means better contact with the cpu core which means better thermal conductivity. Manufacturers are increasingly machining the bases of heatsinks and blocks to amazing smoothness so the practice of DIY lapping is fairly obsolete now.

The hold-down mechanism takes the form of a machined metal plate and 4 long bolts – using the motherboard as support rather than the now-often ignored traditional socket clips. As mentioned above the plate has holes to mount on pretty much any type of recent motherboard you care to name. The plate stands off away from the block and only makes contact via 4 pins that are screwed down through the plate and push against the capscrew heads on the block. I’m not overly sure why this design was chosen… the plate fits flush against the block nicely and this would be totally sufficient… putting all the force through these four pressure points might result in a better seating on the core, but if any are unevenly tightened (which would seem very easy to do without any intent) then the pressure would be biased to one side or corner. And then again perhaps it’s purely aesthetic. Anyhow it works well, and the springs on the bolts allow for a good, tight, secure fit onto the cpu.

As allured to above, this is a simple one-in-one-out design block with a groove-cut copper base firmly sealed onto a thick brass lid. The groove design on the base is interesting, wavey lines and sharp diagonal turns are cut to create the turbulence in the water. It looks nice – not a clear sign of performance obviously, but it does instill some confidence. The two channels at either end of the grooves form small pools for the water to collect in and spread out (or reconverge at the out-end). The cuts are very accurate and clean. The depth of the milling is around about half the total depth of the block, meaning the water is very close to the heat source (the cpu die).

The base is 4mm deep, the lid 12mm without the raised section around the barbs and 15mm inclusive.
4 socket cap screws hold down the 4 corners, with a rubber o-ring to seal the water channels.

The in/out ports are 1/8″ standard threads and so can take the majority of barbs you might want, although anything more than 10mm (3/8″) internal tubing would be slightly daft – this block isn’t overly suitable for 1/2″ tubing systems as it could cause a bottleneck to the flow (unless you do some clever split loop with a graphics block).

The M-I looks fantastic in a setup – it really looks the business. But how does it perform? Well, compared to the NexXxoS HP Pro – a previous top ranker and a block I reviewed some time back – it fares pretty well, consistently performing around 5 degrees below when under load. I tested both blocks in my system, which consists of an XP 2500+ housed in a PC60 case (I prefer to test within a case rather than on a less real-world open testbed) with a single 120mm radiator cooled by a low speed fan. I took readings from MBM5 at startup, idle and prime95-loaded (1 hour of maximum heat output testing) at standard voltage and over-volted. The results are shown in the graph below.

Performance is good then, and all in the all the block impresses. The multi-purpose is a stroke of genius and the sheen on the block is a beautiful sight to behold.

Build quality and design are top notch, and the manufacturers attention to aesthetic detail is clearly apparent. The small bore ports and low volume internals make the block unsuitable to high flow (1/2″) systems but since I’m from the 10/8 stable that doesn’t bother me one bit. One thing I might mention is that I’d probably recommend the use of a shim if you’re of a faint heart… whilst installing the block for the first time I found it a little tricky to get the block into place whilst positioning the clip correctly. The second time I had no issues whatsoever but by then it was too late – I managed to chip the core of my Athlon but, luckily, it still works fine.

I’d say LICS have done a fine job with the M-I. It lives up to the strong reputation of fine German engineering. It also looks peachy in a windowed case (which, let’s face it, most people with watercooling are going to have). The price, at around €40 from com-tra in Germany, is pretty darn affordable too.

For anyone looking for a nice narrow bore water cooling system, who have a local stockist of LICS water cooling products, the M-I would be a great starting point. It’s got the rare combination of form and function.

Good looks
Good performance
Versatile mounting system
Small bore systems only
Mounting system can be a little fiddly at first

Related:
Com-tra.de webstore.
LICS website.
Watercoolplanet block rankings.

Leaving £10 or £20 for a scabby “generic atx psu” or somesuch is not the way forward.

“It’s 600W, how can that possibly be bad?”

It can be, and it probably is. In fact when buying a PSU you’d be best to ignore ones with stupidly exaggerated wattages (new SuperLEET 1600W PSU OMG edition, only £50!!!!11). The PSU needs to be considered as the important component it is and have funds allocated thusly. There are so many people suckered by the proposition of a 600W unit with blue neons and tinted acrylic windows for £15. However it’s also easy to spend too much, with so many “high end” options available.

When I heard the Enermax Coolergiant 480W was on the way I immediately thought this would be one of those overpriced units – my own memories of Enermax power supplies were of £100+ beasts. However, I did own an Enermax power supply back about 4 years ago and it was a pretty hardy unit so, I thought, maybe it’ll be worth the money. A quick look around the net and it seems that things have changed – I guess that the demand for “high end” has pushed up the production of these posh units considerably because the sites I checked were selling this psu for around £70. This is still way above the average, but this “average” is of course produced by the huge numbers of low cost supplies available, many of which are very low quality. My stance is usually to pick something around the lower-middle of the price range, so personally I would probably balk at the price of this Enermax. But for those who tend to choose the premium option, can this unit rise above it’s peers as the best option?

Luring in buyers is this large fairly attractive packaging with some nice box-art. As usual the outer sleeve touts a variety of amazing functions. Those highlighted here on the box front are:

“Blower Fan”
Enermax have ousted the traditional fan on the base of their psu in favour of a blower-type fan, in theory providing better throughput of air and better cooling for the cpu/ram area.

“Smart Fan”
The fans carry on running after the pc is shut down, to exhaust all the built up hot air and cool the psu down. This is a great idea, and one that other manufacturers are using as well.

“Separate 12V rails”
This is something that will set the Enermax apart from cheap psus in terms of build quality – independant 12V rails for the motherboard and for peripherals means cleaner, more stable, power supplied to the board, cpu and expansion cards.

“Manual & Auto”
A bit cryptic, this is referring to the fan speed control on the back of the unit which is provided in addition to automatic fan control in the device. Leaving the rheo set to minimum will mean the fans will run as slow as possible, only speeding up if things get overly warm. Setting it to full means the fans will never slow from full speed.

“SATA connectors”
Pretty obvious, and we’ll get onto the provided connections soon.

Removing the outer sleeve reveals a sturdy cardboard box containing the supply itself, the power cable and screws (and a natty little case sticker) and a fairly thick manual. Don’t be fooled – the manual is only 8 pages long, but in every language known to man (almost). Pulling the unit from it’s pink bubble wrap is quite an impressive moment.

The Coolergiant in all it’s glory and the psu it aims to oust, my SF450-TS.

The beautiful red anodised brushed metal finish is quite striking, and seems wasted on something you’ll never see (unless you have a case with a top window). Still, we all like pretty shiny things and hiding it from view just means that no-one can scratch it. Alongside the SF450-TS we can see that this is an equally monstrous beast – both are large units with impressive looks. A huge mess of cables follows the box, with plenty of connectors on offer.

Connecting people

SATA, standard molexes, and then the “silly” additional connectors.

Emphasis is on the PCI-E connector (because I can’t take a decent photograph for love nor money).

The clever little 20/24 pin motherboard connector. 20 pins will do me just fine.

Counting up we have 4 SATA, 6 regular molex and 2 floppy drive connectors. There’s the 4 pin “AUX” connector as it is often referred to, a 20/24 pin motherboard connector and a new fashioned 6 pin PCI-E card connector. Many of the new beefy PCI-E cards have these connections so seeing a dedicated lead from the psu for it is a nice touch. The “20/24 pin” connector refers to the modular plug for the motherboard – the extra 4 pins needed by new boards can be removed and tucked out of the way when using an older board, which is a fairly clever little idea.

Put on the red light

Taking another look at the gorgeous finish, it really is lovely. I’ve also seen this range in a gold finish but not any other colours. An anodised blue or black would have been nice, perhaps we’ll see them later on.

Internal bits and bobs

Next to the inside – looking inside a power supply gives a fairly instant idea of the quality and cost of the components used. Cheap power supplies will tend to have poorly arranged pcbs, low quality heatsinks, and often a liberal smattering of hot glue holding everything in place.

Quality internals on show here, definitely not your run-of-the-mill cheapo components.

Inside the enermax we see pure TLC poured into the design, high quality heatsinks and everything carefully arranged. This is without doubt a high quality power supply, the massive weight of the unit suggesting the build quality even before looking inside. When in doubt choosing a power supply, heavier is almost always better (that goes for other power devices too, especially amps and the like).

There is a little bit of hot glue, though!

A problem!?

When opening up the unit I found that the cover was slighly bowed away from the main body of the unit. Not really a worry but slightly odd I thought, on replacing the cover I was able to tighten it up and close this tiny gap. As I say it’s nothing to be worried about but it is something that might have been noticed at the factory.

It’s such a small issue that if it’s the worst problem I can find it’s doing very well indeed.

Installation

Strange red clippy thingy. Looks nice, what does it do?

Installing the unit in my ATCS220 was a simple, standard, procedure. Like the last psu I looked at, the SF-450TS, this unit is larger than a standard ATX psu so although I had no problems installing it there may be issues with a small number of cases (those with a cage built to exact “normal” psu size). The big plastic clip (“EMI Shield”) gripping the cables as they exit the casing could cause further problems – it very nearly fouls the support cage in my case but just misses, luckily.

A couple of molexes short in my PC, but then I do have a silly number of drives.

The cable lengths are fairly well thought out. The SF-450TS had such ridiculously long cables that I had to coil them all over the place, mostly hiding them behind the motherboard tray. For a midi-tower case the cables on this supply seem almost perfect – the molex strings all reach the bottom of the case with enough slack to route neatly, and yet there’s not too much to tidy it away in spare gaps in the drive bays. The number of connectors was a slight problem for me – with 6 hard disks, a baybus, a DVDRW and an LCD display I have quite a demanding rig as far as molexes go… if 2 of my hard disks had been SATA then I would not have had a problem, and I doubt many people run 6 PATA hard disks, so I don’t believe many people would have any issues. The number of connectors seems adequate but I do feel 3 more wouldn’t have gone amiss – the Super Flower had so many molexes I didn’t know what to do with them, but too many is always better than too few. I had to use a couple of Y-splitters, something I haven’t used for quite some time (and something that wasn’t included with the psu). One is pictured above.

Back, front and bottom fans.

The fan control knob, and the non-existant voltage switch (shown).

Cool beans

The cooling system seems to have been fairly well conceived and I think I understand the choice of the blower fan – the front and back 80mm fans would create a nice wind tunnel effect on their own, and I suppose a standard fan on the bottom would interrupt this flow. The focussed nature of the blower means, I guess, that the airflow is not interrupted. Whatever the reasons for the choices, the noise created by the three fan setup is minimal – as quiet, I’d say, as the 140mm fan setup on the Super Flower. This is a very subtle power supply which means it’s ideally suited for water cooled rigs, where noise reduction is a primary concern, or just for people with a distaste for fan-whirr. Noise seems to be a top selling point for psu manufacturers these days and it seems that Enermax has done a good job here, somewhat justifying their price premium.

The fan control knob is neatly situated and fairly easy to find when reaching around the case. In my fairly averagely-noisy system I couldn’t hear any real difference between the top and bottom settings, which I find rather strange. A reassuringly warm air blows from the back of the supply, and temperatures all read normal.

There’s no voltage (110/230) switch on the back of this unit as it switches automatically depending on supply – a nice feature if only because it’ll stop you accidentally blowing it up by switching to the wrong setting.

Leaves on the line

A quiet psu is no good if it can’t provide solid rails so, with the supply installed, we’ll see what happens when taxing the system. I ran Prime95 for an hour to give the system a real workout, a result I already have for the Super Flower psu.

First shown are the idle (very gentle system use) readings from MBM, and after follow the readings after the hour of stress testing and the percentage difference to idle readings. As you can see things got a bit hotter but the power supply hardly even flinched.

Tested using an AthlonXP 2500+ chip on an AOpen AK77-400MAX board (awesome board btw!)

These results are pretty decent and certainly nothing to worry about. The under/over figures are all pretty small (the 3.2% drop on the -5V line is the biggest discrepancy). Rated ampages on the various lines are fairly impressive, as we’d expect from a psu of this ilk. The line currents are listed on the side of the unit.

So what do we have here? Well, we have a well built, very attractive, solid hard working power supply. But it does come with a price tag to match. As mentioned earlier it’s not as expensive as high-end power supplies used to be (although Enermax do produce a ~£100 unit, so I suppose this is their “mid-range” effort) but compared to other brands it is still an expensive choice. HiPer, Super Flower, Tagan and Antec all make similarly specced units at lower prices, but whether they are as polished (quality-wise, as well as the literal meaning) as this Enermax unit is something I cannot comment on. £70 is a lot of money, and saving £30/40 on your psu on a system build could mean the difference between dropping in a 9600 and a 9800 (in old money).

To those willing to splash the cash, and who want a top quality power supply from a name with plenty of clout behind it, this Enermax is doubtless a great choice. Those working on a tight budget will probably want to look elsewhere.

Great build quality
Good quality rails
Dual 12V lines for stability
Lovely aesthetics
Good allocation of connectors
Decent cooling
Reasonably quiet
Not ludicrous, but still pricey
..£70 is a fairly high end price, but then this is a high end psu
Not as many connectors as the SF450
..those with ludicrous numbers of PATA devices (like me) will suffer
Small niggle with the slightly bent cover (see above)

Related:
Coolergiant
Specs page
Enermax

Second opinion:
3dGameMan.com – “Kickass” product
Teccentral.de – “Oscar” award (German to English translation)

As with everything, the addition of LCD displays started with electronics whizz-kids – wiring controllers to their parallel ports. It has now grown to companies offering production line USB character display and graphical models. But even for all the expansion in this (rather niche) market, the prices remain fairly high for the mainstream products – Maxtrix Orbital and CrystalFontz offer some excellent products but neither can provide a price the less enthusiastic modder wants to pay. Take a step backwards, in terms of technology, to the parallel port LCD screen and you can have show-off stats scrolling accross your case front for a bargain price. In this case, just shy of £20.

The very non-descript box

The more interesting contents of said box

The LCD I’m looking at is a 20×4 character model from watercoolingshop.com. It’s a parallel port model, using the common HD44780 controller, pre-wired for easy “installation”. The display is sold in a plain box, with a cable… no fancy extras, no software, no attractive drive-bay surround and no manual… but it’s so easy to find some free display software with instructions, and with only one cable to connect installation couldn’t be a lot simpler. The lack of a drive-bay insert may trouble some people – you might need to do some DIY to install the unit cleanly into a case, or construct an external support.

So we’ve established what comes in the box – an LCD and a cable. This one cable integrates the power and data supplies for the screen, keeping everything neat and simple. A standard molex plug provides power and this is fed back through the housing of the parallel port and up a common lead to the screen itself. This means for internal mounting you will need to loop the power out of the case to the parallel connector, then loop the cable for the screen back into the case again. For external mounting you just need to feed the power lead into the case. The easiest method is to remove an expansion slot cover and use the resulting hole… perfectionists might like to cut a slit for the leads into the cover and slide it back into place. I’ll leave that part up to you.

The combined data/power cable

Once the power and parallel leads are connected everything else is software configuration. After installing port95nt [alt], lcd driving software will be able to communicate with the display through your parallel port. What exactly is displayed will depend on your choice of software – I use a winamp plugin to display music information and a visualisation on my screen, but many software titles and plugins are available to show such information as system temperatures, cpu load, memory usage and so on.

I gave LCDSmartie and LCDPlugin a try:

LCDSmartie

LCDSmartie is an open-source program offering all the functions of commercial products like LCDC but without any [compulsory] purchase price. Straight after installing, the program will cycle a number of preset screens. You can then customise these and create your own set of screens using the at first daunting but in fact very easy screens setup controls.

Looks complicated? It’s really not once you get the hang of it!

In fact the default screens are fairly likely to be the kind of information you’ll want to display. In the true spirit of modding, though, it’d be rude not to do some personalisation. Some screens also seem to be setup to use larger screens better so a bit of trimming down can make these screens look much nicer on a 4×20 screen. Here’s some photo’s of some of the screens:

Example screens, including the (optional) introduction “splash” screen

An example of trimming a screen down for the 4×20 display. The top line scrolls.

And to show that making a custom screen is easy, even I managed it:

Computer name / Time / Date / Uptime – all added from LCDSmarties list of preset options.

I won’t go through all the options… suffice to say there are plenty. You can install and run LCDSmartie without a display installed as it has a preview window on the desktop which emulates the output of an LCD panel. So, if you’re not sure if the output suits your needs, give it a try.

Desktop LCD “emulation”

LCDPlugin

The first setup screen for LCDPlugin

LCDPlugin is a plugin which outputs winamp information only, no other stuff like system stats. It’s a lovely plugin but since Smartie is able to do most if not all of the winamp related tasks it seems a bit redundant. However bundled with it is a visualisation plugin with outputs the winamp equaliser to the LCD display. It’s a bit buggy (it needs to start with Winamp and if you stop the output once you cannot turn it back on it without restarting Winamp) but it looks excellent, especially with the drop-off effect enabled. Here’s a short incredibly low-res animated GIF taken from a video recorded on my digital camera:

*daannnce.. to the muusiccc*

This is the best function of LCDPlugin… for displaying winamp info I actually feel LCDSmartie does a better job, but it doesn’t have the funky graphic output!

Setting up is a little more complex than in LCDSmartie, with no clever menu to pick and choose functions from. It’s hardly difficult though, as a help box-out gives you the codes required to display the certain bits of information.

Only one screen with LCDPlugin, though plenty of Winamp info to choose from

To be honest LCDPlugin is only really useful for the graphical output… for Winamp data and other info LCDSmartie is the business. There are other packages out there but for the purposes of this review LCDSmartie shows off what the display can do. I’m happy with this hardware and software combination – it would be a nice idea to ship out LCDSmartie on a CD with the display but I guess this would add to costs and I’m not totally sure about the legality of distributing open source on disk/CD.

The WCS display has proved very easy to get running and is a nice, and dare I say it almost useful, addition to the front of my case. For case modders without a display it offers amazing value when compared to it’s peers in the marketplace… the parallel interface may scare some people off but it really needn’t. The software scene is more commercially driven for serial and USB units, but community development has kept the parallel display alive and kicking – the open-source LCDSmartie is an excellent program and continues to evolve.

The panel is covered with protective plastic to keep it pristine during transit

The price of this unit had me worried initially but playing with it for a while has shown me it’s as good as any other HD44780 unit… really, how could it not have been? If you’ve wanted an LCD display for your computer but have been disuaded by the extortionate prices of the serial and USB units, and you have a spare parallel port (printers tend to use USB these days so the parallel port is generally free), one of these units could be perfect for you.

Cheap
Does the job
Looks great
Very easy to set up
Uses parallel port
..(if your printer uses it you’re out of luck)
Requires wires looped in through the back
..(usb lcds can be connected to the motherboard)

Related:
Watercoolingshop.com – online store.
LCDSmartie @ Sourceforge.
LCDPlugin @ Sourceforge.
CrystalFontz
Matrix Orbital

The event was held in a marquee erected next to the PC World superstore in Croydon and attracted a fair amount of public interest from the days PC World customers. There were also a few devotees of the modding scene present like myself, though I was also there as part of Carls support team.

A camera team and announcer covered the events inside the tent, including interviews with each modder. Unfortunately this was for the benefit of visitors only, and as far as I am aware these interviews will not be made available. If they are, rest assured I will include them here.

The list of Readers Drives winners in attendance:
Karl Brisco – winner issue 1
Barry Du-Crow – winner issue 10
Kevin “Knipex” Griffin – winner issue 8
Josh “Mister_Tad” Moore – winner issue 7
Luke Pillian – winner issue 4
Richard “Pug” Pugh – winner issue 6
Nathan Quick – winner issue 11
Carl “Carlos” Tedman – winner issue 12 (not yet released) (yay Carl!)
Toby Waters – winner issue 9

Each brought the winning case itself (as was stipulated by the rules) although many had made a few changes since the publication of their winning issue. Some brought another computer as well. The competitors were arranged in a near-circle in the centre of the marquee and people were invited in to walk around and take a look, and to vote for the case they judged their favourite.

Enough waffle!

Karl Brisco

Karl’s rig from Custom PC returns but with some changes. The old swiftech blocks have been replaced with Danger Den maze 4 components. A new cylindrical reservoir also warrants a new viewing window on the side panel to show it off. Two pumps provide the pressure needed to circulate the HUGE external radiator, which is far more external than most – this radiator is mounted on the outside of Karl’s house, on the exterior wall of his home office!

Barry Du-Crow

Barry won the Readers Drives contest with a rather unorthodox case mod involving a Barbie doll! The Barbie case was at the show for all to see and was quite a draw due to it’s sheer wackiness! The most interesting feature is that to open the CD-ROM tray takes a squeeze of Barbie’s hand, which pokes through the side window. Barbie sits on a 40GB IDE swing, supported by two LED-lit rods.

Barry brought along two other rigs, one a mesh and acrylic mix and the other a monster of black steel mesh holding a prometia-like cooling unit (I forget if it was a branded prometia or other type). The pressure dials on the front of this monster were quite a draw to the eye. This rig was a contender for the “who keeps tripping the power” prize, along with one of Pug’s computers!

Kevin Griffin

Kevin, or Knipex, brought along the interesting double case that had won him the prize in issue 8 but with some quite major changes. Both front panels were completely rebuilt and resprayed in the same unique style as the side and top panels. This case was a real looker and certainly a contender for a prize. The clever hinging mechanism gives very easy access to the case internals which, non surprisingly, are very spacious and would be easy to work in. The power supply had also been modified to run cool with a single large fan, made before psus with large fans were easily available. Another case of the computer world following a few steps behind the enthusiasts.

Apparently one of the side panels took a bit of a bashing from the PC World transit team which is a real shame.

Josh Moore

Josh (Mister_Tad) brought along his modified Yeong Yang cube case with some lovely Japanese styling. The top window etch looks fantastic and is complemented by his custom fan “guards”. A passer by realised that these fan grills aren’t too effectively at protecting fingers when she lost half a fingernail whilst poking about. That’ll teach her to look and not touch! “Mrs_Tad”, appointed guard of the case, found this rather amusing but managed to stifle laughter.

Luke Pillian

Luke’s rig has changed little since winning Readers Drives, but he has built a fantastic front panel mounted headphone amplifier and integrated it into his system. This panel out shines any off-the-shelf front panel I have ever seen and is truly a gorgeous addition to the case. UV-lit VU meters show both left and right channels, and a precision machine steel panel gives it that retro stereo look. In fact, with the mix of wood panelling and clean steel the whole system looks somewhat like an old piece of hi-fi equipment. A massive tube (a toilet U-bend?) provides ducting of air from the exhaust fan and some muffling of the fans noise.

Richard Pugh

Richard “Pug” Pugh brought along two rigs, Hexadragon and Alien Li. Hexadragon was the winning rig in issue 6 of Custom PC and was looking lush. The heavily modified front of the Chieftec Dragon case has had “modders mesh” smoothly integrated into the panels by means of plenty of bondo and even more elbow grease. The work has paid off as the look is absolutely fantastic and a unique style among so many Dragon based cases. Aqua-computer cooling products give the inside a wonderful clean look and also provide stunningly stylish front panels behind the mesh door. A blue LCD display mounted to one of these panels finishes the look.

Alien Li is an impressive case project since it manages to cram a full water cooling loop into the tiny Lian Li PC50 case. This wasn’t a Custom PC winner, but it was nice that Pug brought it along. It goes to show you don’t need a massive tower case to enjoy the benefits of water cooling.

Nathan Quick

Nathan brought with him a true behemoth of a case. The Mountain Mods case is imported from the USA in very small numbers and Nathan managed to grab one of the elusive cases for his water cooling project. There’s no denying that this case demanded attention – the front panel a gleaming mix of red fans and an aquatube-like bubbling reservoir. “Big” is the over-riding theme of this case, with the big bore water cooling loop dominating the case internals. No real large scale case modifications here, but a well integrated water loop and a good clean theme. Since issue 11 of the magazine, the internals were upgraded significantly as Nathan was going for the “Speed King” award at the contest.

Carl Tedman

My old housemate and member of our forums, Carl hasn’t been featured yet in Custom PC but has been confirmed as winner of Readers Drives and should be published in the next issue (12). His large black cube was the only case at the show completely custom built from scratch – the only pre-built parts of this case are the drive racks which are salvaged from old case chasses. Carl laid out an impressive stand with the cube accompanied by a ps2, surround sound system and two custom build Dancing Stage dance mats. A few demonstrations by Carl and brother Luke attracted a lot of attention from passers by! The ps2 also attracted the almost undivided attention of Pug’s son for the majority of the afternoon! His Eye Toy antics got us on the PA video screens quite a lot. Without wanting to be biased, I think Carl’s had a certain edge over most of the other cubes since it was built from scratch rather than being shop-bought. Water cooling seemed to be the biggest draw to most people with an “oooh, is that safe?” comment coming from oh so many visitors, so it’s a shame Carl was one of few air-cooled rigs in attendance.

Toby Waters

Last but most certainly not least, Toby’s fantastic voltmeter mod was showcased at Modfest by his parents since he was on holiday in Japan (poor lad!). Toby’s father did a fantastic job of fighting the cases corner in the competition interviews, despite being a self-confessed “luddite” and knowing very little about the computer internals. The old voltmeter was gutted and the insides replaced with a VIA mini-ITX motherboard, turning it into a fully fledged PC. The PSU is cunningly disguised inside another box, which also houses a stunning valve clock (goodness knows how it works!). A third enclosure houses an LCD and a psone screen (another favourite item at the show). Everything was very clean, apart from the power cables (which only needed a bit of braiding to tidy them up) and the case was a definite favourite with many of the visitors.

Other rigs

Before we get to the winners, a look at the rigs brought along by the lads (let’s hope they don’t mind being called “lads”) from Custom PC magazine. As well as the “Beat the Office PC” rig, they brought along the recently featured orange Centurion case and a fantastic new Coolermaster 4xx (I can’t find the real model number) based water cooled rig. I’ve always loved these rather rare cases and the vertically mounted bay res, a good variation on the theme, is the first time I’ve see a bay reservoir looking quite so good.

1.5MB uncompressed AVI also available

And so to the winners. The awards up for grabs were King of Kings for the case voted best by the panel of judges, Speed King for the case performing best in the Custom PC benchmarking application, King Creative for the most creative mod, Best of Show for the case voted top by the visiting public, and the All Comers Crown for the best visiting mod.

The All Comers Crown wasn’t a particularly difficult fight since only Anthony Higginson’s Mannequin Man was in attendance. Not to detract from his modding skills though – the “case” is certainly a unique and rather marvellous mod! Congratulations Anthony on your win.

Speed King went to the aptly named Nathan Quick with his newly upgraded beast. It seems like a rather odd prize to offer, since you\’d think whoever spends the most money in the running up to the show would nab the award. But it\’s not just money – with an impressive cooling system and a good overclocking ratio, many congratulations to Nathan on his win.

Nathan also grabbed himself the Best of Show award – the case voted best by the visiting public. This must have been a fantastic prize to win, knowing that all the passers by thought his case was the best in the room. So many congratulations to Nathan for that!

King Creative went to a hugely deserving winner, Toby Waters the designer of the Voltmeter PC. I had no doubt throughout the day that Toby’s case would attract this prize and indeed it did. The mod is just superbly done.

The King of Kings prize, certainly the most coveted, was a tense fight. When it came to the time, the judges up on stage announced that they had decided to introduce a second place prize in this competition. The runner up to the King of Kings prize was our very own Carl and his custom built cube case! Huge congratulations for Carl, and I’m very pleased that he won a prize in recognition of his work. I watched the evolution of that case for months on end and know how much effort went into producing it.

So just one case left… the winner of King of Kings and thus, arguably, the overall winner of the day. The title went to Karl Brisco and his outlandish external radiator cooled cube case! The case itself might not be the most incredible mod ever, as admitted by judge Spencer Kelly, but the sheer madness of modding your house to improve your case cooling really does epitomise the spirit of case modding and extreme cooling. Congratulations to Karl, who won (among a case and other assorted parts) an Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4GHz. More important than that, I’m sure, is the trophy which I hope will be prominently displayed either in his home or, well… we are case modders after all, in his case!

The day was thoroughly enjoyed by all and was an excellent event. I hope the sponsors will return for another contest next year or, hopefully, sooner and that not only the veterans but many more modders will be attracted to compete.

Special thanks to Bigz and Mister_Tad for being my chaperones to the event, Fly for providing much appreciated (and fully needed) Pizza Hut and also to Pug’s son for playing Eye Toy with such enthusiasm on Carl’s rig that he must have attracted the most attention drawn by anyone at the event all day!

I’d also like to thank all the modders present for being thoroughly friendly people. I had a good chat with most of the exhibitors and it was nice to meet both people that I have known on forums and also people I have never conversed with before.

Here’s looking forward to Modfest 2005! (editor’s note: It never happened, lol)

Extended image gallery is here.

Related:
Custom PC.
PC World.

To stick with the recap for a while, many people were reporting some peculiar repeatitive clicking sound with the dual fan Super Flower psus, as well as many of the HiPer (I think) and Top Power supplies (these are essentially the same units). Well, low and behold my supply did begin to emit this rather peculiar (and slightly unnerving) gentle ticking noise. Apparently it’s entirely normal, but it’s something I’d rather a psu didn’t do. Interestingly the rather expensive Tagan range seem to display this behaviour as well. Let’s hope this new Super Flower offering will spare our ears (and my nerves) from the odd noises.

I’m your biggest fan!
Yeah I’ve used this heading before… big whoop, wanna fight about it?

So… a 140mm fan… that’s… big. Most computers still use the good old staple diet of 80mm fans. Some more modern efforts (as well as quality older models) have ousted these runts of the fan world in favour of their beefier 120mm brothers. But this is the first time I have seen a 140mm fan in a computer, and I think it’s clear that the future is big. Big fans spin slower whilst pushing the same (or more) air, and can push this air while producing less noise than a smaller fan. This is certainly a good thing, and means Super Flower can market this as a super quiet supply – something which is becoming increasingly important to computer users and hardware buyers.

The SF-450TS comes in a fairly attractive retail box along with a power lead (I got a silly euro type one, but UK retail boxes will include a proper plug) and a well printed manual. The box is emblazoned with all kinds of funky icons and details of features, which we’ll go through.

“Remain running fan after turning off”
Quite a clever little feature this – after turning off the PC (via the ATX power switch) the psu fan will continue to spin, thus exhausting the remaining heat from the system, for a further 10 minutes. Very nice! Actually, the fan continues to spin for 5 minutes. The manual states this figure, but the box graphic says 10. How odd.

“Noise <21dBA”
Something I unfortunately cannot test, but that’s quite a claim.

“Power controlling IC”
Well, ok. Fairly vague, and probably something fairly essential to any PSU.

“Serial ATA support”
A marvellous addition, but only 2 SATA power plugs are provided. I understand it must be hard for psu manufacturers to decide how many SATA connectors to include as takeup has been fairly slow. Two is a good start.

“Temperature detecting”
As with the previous Super Flower psu, this unit has an automatic fan speed dependant on temperature. Nice feature.

“Full load at 0C-50C”
I assume this means the psu can provide it’s full output upto 50 degrees C, at which point I guess it must drop off slightly. Seems a reasonable range.

“Green Power efficiency > 72%”
Not amazing, certainly not bad.

“Fan speed monitoring”
A wire and 3pin connector are provided to connect the psu fan to the motherboard. Nice, but most people will probably be using the fan header on the board for, wait for it, a fan. It means you can monitor the fans speed using MBM or similar which some might find useful.

“Fan speed switch”
As previously mentioned, the excellent speed selector switch is back (as seen on the full Super Flower range). A closer look at this later.

“Output voltage protection”
A fairly generic accolade. Better than not having it I guess!

“PFC efficiency >= 0.996″
Well… when’s the last time you got 99.6% for anything? Active PFC isn’t the most important ‘feature’ ever.

Whew, well, that took ages. Let’s take a peek at the sexy outer, and the goodies on the inside.

This is the “black diamond” titanium coloured version. I’m not entirely sure what alternative colours are available but the box suggests that blue, gold, green, red and plain steel models exist. The finish on this paint job is an amazing thing to behold, it’s absolutely gorgeous. A very professional car-quality shine exudes quality. It’s definitely something that needs to be shown off in a windowed or perspex case. The fan is almost the entire size of the bottom of the unit, and the air is vented out of the back of the unit through some lovely hexagonal mesh (very popular in the case modding community at the minute). The fan is translucent and peaking inside you can see that the unit even uses lush red PCBs! I’m sure these must be more expensive than plain board and seems a strange extra expense to incur. I guess with enough buying power these costs must pail into insignificance.

Opening her up we can see the red PCBs and some decent quality heatsinks on the FETs. The construction and layout are of a high quality and very neat. Brownie points for the Super Flower engineers.

Cable town

Super Flower certainly haven’t skimped on cables and connectors. The unit boasts 9 standard molex plugs as well as the 2 SATA power plugs. We also have 2 floppy drive style plugs (nowadays more useful for graphics cards such as the 9800 range). Of course we also have the ATX lead, shrouded in a rather fetching Super Flower branded braiding, and the p4 extra power connector. Finally we have the aforementioned fan speed monitoring plug and a further mystery 2pin header. Venturing into the manual gave no clues as to what this is for; my best guess is some kind of “green” power switch… I’m not brave enough to plug it into anything, I simply tucked it away!

The cables hooking up this myriad of connectors are all really quite long. The image above shows the supply installed into a Coolermaster ATCS220 case, a standard midi tower size, and the case looks full already! Too much is definitely better than too little, as I have found so many times buying cheap psus with no more than 6 molexes none long enough to reach where they should. So this isn’t a negative point, but you will have to do some clever cable management to keep your case neat and tidy. I managed to get everything in really quite cleanly:

The monster fan looks almost absurd when you get the supply into your case! But it’s obvious that this thing has some serious air-shifting potential!

Honey I’m home

Taking a look at the rear of the unit we see the fan speed controller, the same design as the previous supply but with a rather fetching blue button in place of the old red one. Pressing the button cycles through Auto, Slow and Turbo, lighting a blue, green or red LED respectively. The LEDs are really quite bright, and will cast a spot onto a wall behind. This might annoy you or might fill you with glee, I’m rather indifferent to it. The hexagonal ‘honeycomb’ mesh looks fantastic and has been treated magnificently by the painting process. it’s also very unrestrictive to airflow – a good thing with that 140mm monster piling air through it.

More power!

So we’ve covered the major features and the design of the SF-450TS, what of it’s performance:

Listed specifications

Tested using an Athlon 1.33GHz chip on an AOpen AK77+ board

The rails fair rather well. 5% is often touted as a reasonable margin for the voltage rails on a power supply, and all but the -5V rail adhere to this comfortably. In all honesty I don’t know how important the -5V rail is, other than that it is connected to a pin on the ATX connector. Nearly 12% over is quite a margin, but as a (somewhat) educated guess I would dare say that being over is better than being under. Over can be cut down, under cannot be made up. Good performance here.

So… shall I buy it?

The SF-450TS is a gorgeous unit with good solid performance. The large fan creates such a quiet whisper that I can hardly hear it over the whirr of my hard disks. The blue illumination from the LEDs embedded into this fan (did I forget to mention that?) would be enough for a soft illumination of a case without any further internal lighting, or can form a part of your existing lightint colour scheme. The lights cannot be turned off however, at least not without the crafty swipe of a soldering iron (or a pair of scissors…). The continued cooling after shutdown is a fantastic idea – integrating this into the power supply just makes so much sense that I don’t know why it hasn’t been like this all along.

One word of warning – the SF-450TS is slightly longer than a regular power supply. It should fit into the majority of cases, but it might not fit into all. It has a good 20mm extra on regular units – this did actually pose a problem in my modded case since I have installed an aquatube reservoir up top near the psu. It fits snugly up against normal sized units (such as my 120mm fan model) but the mammoth 450-TS won’t fit into the case. As long as there is no restriction at the end of the psu – and all but the fewest cases with have nothing, just a shelf to rest the unit on – there will be no problem. But it’s something to consider.

I can’t comment on price since the main stockist here for Super Flower, ebuyer, don’t have them listed and in fact they seem quite elusive things. If you find one, and the price is good, I certainly recommend you consider purchasing one. I’m very happy with mine.

Looks awesome.
Very quiet.
Great quality voltage rails.
Plenty of cabling and connectors.
SATA connectors!
Slightly oversized.
Only ATX cable is braided.

I couldn’t possibly leave a review without featuring Psyduck, who has become somewhat of a mascot. So here he (she? it?) is, showing off once again the lovely shine of the casing:

Related:
Super Flower homepage

Right, let’s get started.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this case when the box arrived at my door. In fact I wasn’t even expecting the case at all, but that’s a whole different story. The box certainly isn’t small – it’s a whopping great thing, which usually means decent packaging. Indeed, the case was suspended inside using polystyrene supports found in most if not all case boxes. It’s nothing special but it’s always nice to see – these should mean a comfortable and secure transport for the case. Unfortunately this time something went wrong.

Clearly the front of the case has taken some damage. On examination is seems as if there was some shipping damage to the front of the chassis – the tapered stud into the which the bolt for the front panel screws had become slightly wonky, so it seems to me like the crack must have been caused by abnormal pressure on the plastic front due to a knock of some kind. I hope this isn’t common but I would expect that on a retail product you could have this panel replaced. No-one likes dealing with customer “service” though, so Super Flower should be concerned about this problem.

I must add that my review sample was shipped in from Germany rather than coming from eBuyer’s warehouses. This rather more lengthy trip is more than likely the cause of the damage, buying within the UK would more than likely be a lot less “treachorous” shall we say. I am pretty confident that the packing materials are adequate for safe transport of the case – they easily match up to the precautions taken by other manufacturers.

On the assumption that my cracked panel was an isolated incident I won’t say too much about it, and we’ll move on to the next part of the review – the included accessories. Upon opening a new case you’ll more often than not be greated with a little mystery box full of various bits. The contents of this non-descript box will generally vary with the quality of the case ranging from a few motherboard standoffs to a full set of thumbscrews, blanking plates, bezels and so on. The Super Flower accessories are fairly pleasing:

Included are:
Pin-out guides for the various connectors (rather handy)
Bag of screws including brass standoffs, motherboard screws, drive screws, 3 small cable ties
Two blanking plates – one standard replacement and one with a cutout for routing the front sound/firewire ports.
One 5.25″ bezel
One 3.5″ bezel

I find it slightly odd that the bezels are shipped in this box rather than just installed. When I saw the holes in the front bezel I thought Super Flower had “done a Cooler Master” on me (Cooler Master are reasonably famous for not including a full set of bezels, the swines). Happily this case does come will a full set – good for those who won’t use any drive bays or want to “stealth mod” their drives. So far so good.

Next I’ll include some full shots of the case – it’s about time, right?

The case front is rather attractive, with the aforementioned acrylic panel fronting a rather tasty metallic blue powdercoat. The lower half of the front panel is home to a fairly large air intake which backs onto two 80mm fans (not included with the case). The fan “grill” is punched out very accurately and cleanly and has a rather clean look to it. Above this are the power and reset button along with the hard disk and power LEDs, tucked in beside the 3.5″ drive bays. The buttons are plastic painted in a very shiny metallic silver.

Right at the bottom of the case we see the front I/O ports, something becoming very widespread on modern cases. I’m still not convinced, but these are fairly tastily done and might be useful to some. I have to say, I do sometimes find myself using the front USB port on my computer to plug in my digital camera since it takes a lot more effort to lean round the back of the case (or buy a hub). The SF-561T2 (gosh that is a sexy name) also includes audio in and out (mic in, line out, but you could use these for anything since they simply plug into the soundcard) and a single firewire port alongside the more standard two usb ports. The panel itself is incredibly shiny – look at the reflection in that last picture. I’ve also highlighted one of the 6 bolts which holds the plastic and metal bezels to the chassis (more on this later).

Now to the inside of the case. As you can see from the previous pictures this is quite a large case – boasting five 5.25″ drive bays and three 3.5″ bays makes it larger than most standard mid-towers (which tend to have only four or even three of the larger bays). It is positively cavernous inside, partly thanks to it’s physical size but also a great deal to do with some clever design. The internal design is very reminiscent of a lian li case, even down to the removable hard disk rack at the lower front of the case. Looking at it alongside my PC60 it’s clear that there was some inspiration there – this is definately no bad thing, since the lian li cases follow an excellent design.

The main two approaches split the two big guns Cooler Master and Lian Li, with CM taking the rigid 3.5″ bays up the front approach and LL going for the removable rack method. Personally I find both equally easy to work with but there is definately something nice about having a removable disk rack. This case does not, however, have a removable tray for the motherboard.

Enough words, here’re some pictures of the insides:

There’s that hard disk rack. It fastens in a very similar way to the Lian Li version but has an additional thumbscrew securing it at the top. It doesn’t have the same locking clip at the back as the LL version so needs this extra screw – perhaps this feature was patented, or maybe Super Flower didn’t want to be too blatent about their plageurism? The overall internal structure is very tidy and exudes an initial feeling of good construction quality. This feeling is not dismissed once you get in closer – the case has been well built and well planned.

Let’s take a look at the cooling potential of the case:

The two front fans are secured using Antec/Chieftec-esque clips. Very simple and very effective. The fans simply push into place and are held securely by two pins and 4 clips. They definately will not come loose as long as they are installed correctly. I can’t see these clips posing any problems… when installing LED fans extra care might be needed to ensure the clips don’t snag the wires for the LEDs. With the hard disk rack installed we can see there is adequate clearance to not inhibit the airflow unduly. Since the rack does not completely shadow the fans, cool air can also bypass the disks and aid the cooling circuit for the rest of the case.

The last picture above shows another 80mm fan held at the top of the case, fastened to the window panel. Note an inquisitive Psyduck peering in. Cheeky little fella.

The top fan is centrally positioned, quite sensibly clearing the psu at the back and optical drives from the front. This fan is included with the case, but is the only one. It’s a blue LED model, how rare.

Your biggest fan

Returning to the rear of the case we have fan mounts in the standard position “above” the I/O plate. What’s slightly non-standard about the mounts is that they are drilled for either two 80mm fans or a single 120mm fan.

This is an excellent idea as it means that if you have a 120mm fan (which do tend to cost a fair premium over their 80mm cousins) you can use it in place of noisier 80mm fans. This could also act as a mount for a 120mm radiator, although size will be a serious issue. I tried with a CoolingKing 120mm radiator and it was far too deep – it covered the CPU area and the block was not sufficiently low-profile to fit. With the right parts it could work, or perhaps mounting the radiator or fan on the outside… we’re getting into the realms of “ghetto modding” now so I’ll promptly stop.

Here’s the rear fan arrangement using both 80mm and 120mm fans:

Clever stuff, and something it’d be nice to see in more cases. So that’s the case given a once over, and it all seems in order.

Now to installing a computer into it – it’s no good having all kinds of lovely features, fans and windows and all that malarky if it’s a real chore to get a computer in there. With it’s lack of a removable motherboard tray, fairly de rigeur nowadays, you might think installation is tricky. Not so – since this case is really rather large there’s plenty of space for maneuvering especially with the hard disk rack removed. I always find it’s best to install the motherboard before anything else, but even with a few optical drives in they’re so far up that they won’t be anything like in the way.

The expansion slots are covered with the old, and rather cheap-and-nasty, break off metal covers. It’s not a massive problem but for those who might change components often there is only one replacement cover supplied so you could end up with empty holes. It seems to me it would have been a tiny cost increase to have proper screw-down covers on all the slots but I guess every penny counts in this game.

The psu installation caught me out at first… being used to the likes of Lian Li I instinctively started feeding all the (excessive amounts of) cables from the power supply through from the back of the case. Not correct – this case requires that the psu is fed in from the inside, onto a small shelf on the far side of the chassis. The installation method is no problem, but the shelf is completely inadequate for support. The power supply must be held in place whilst screwed into the back or else it’ll fall – simple as that. No big deal I guess, and it probably makes it easier to slide into place. But it’s strange considering most if not all of the cases I have used have had a proper supporting shelf for the psu.

A room with a view

Sticking with the psu, the top window means that your power supply is visible through the top of the case. Most power supplies are pretty unexciting, but luckily Super Flower has leapt into the fold and produced a power supply with the shiniest finish of any paintjob I have ever seen. This is the SF-450TS and we will have a review of it soon (this article will be updated with a link when the time comes). The amazing glossy finish looks pretty fantastic through the window, but if you have a rather lacklustre power supply you might want to do invest in something a bit prettier – such is the downfall of windowed cases, the stuff inside actually has to look nice.

The top window also has the unfortunate side effect of showing off all your messy cables. Luckily once you get an optical drive installed the mess is largely hidden, and of course you’ll be spending countless hours conducting some fantastic cable management won’t you… yeh, me neither. The last picture above shows the rather attractive blue LED fan in place. Blue LED fans might be a bit passé nowadays but along with the lovely metallic blue powdercoat finish it really looks the biz. As previously said it should be a pretty effective chimney for heat outlet, many cases now include an exhaust fan in this position.

The connectors for the front buttons and LEDs are the standard fayre but are nicely labelled to ease installation woes. Admittedly pretty much all cases have labelled connectors like this but that doesn’t make it any less useful. The connections are reasonable well arranged together so as to minimise the effort required to get them to the right pins on the board. Of course this might not be true for all boards but it worked fairly well for me. I can’t be alone in thinking it’s about damn time these pinouts were standardised so that cases could have a single block connector – will no-one take the initiative?

The power LED is the ubiquitous “bl00″ but the hard disk LED is a less common orange. LEDs were always green for power, orange for hard disk back in the day… strange that Super Flowr should decide to bring the old orange back into play rather than using the more common red used nowadays. Nothing wrong with orange though, looks fine to me. Of course these are easy to change to suit individual taste as long as you have some basic electronic knowledge.

To finish off this part of the review, some pictures of the computer installed and up-and-running:

Scratching the surface

Right well I think we’ve taken a good enough look at the case to make a decision as to whether it suits our taste or not. Personally I find the case rather attractive, but everyone’s tastes differ so I won’t dwell on my own opinion of the appearance. I can however cast a critical eye over some of the things I found either wrong or odd about the case. Yep, it’s time to look for the bad points.

Throughout the review so far I’ve been pretty positive and for good reason. Generally this case is very well built and intelligently designed. It’s only in the cosmetic department that I noticed some flaws. Obviously the cracked bezel mentioned at the very start of the review is quite a major blemish but as I said this is something that should be easily replaced and, if I was bothered, I could contact SF for a replacement I am 100% sure. Other than that though I noticed several other blemishes to the acrylic front piece… more than several in fact, every single cut on the bezel had associated with it what is either a fracture in the surface or a scratch… these pictures are my best attempts at displaying the flaws:

You can only really see these if you’re really looking for them – again obviously with the exception of the crack in the top right corner. The scratches or fractures, whichever they are, around the ventilation holes are really fairly hard to notice… those around the power and reset buttons are slightly more apparent but really I don’t feel they are a massive problem. I’d call them more of a minor annoyance and obviously it would be better if they weren’t there. I can’t possibly speculate about whether this is normal or a freak occurance but the case has to lose some points here. In the final picture you can also see the edge of the Super Flower Fan Master, a fan speed controller and temperature sensor the company also produces.

Face off

Since the front panel seemed to me screaming at me to remove it I did so and realised the front of the case isn’t coloured in the same way as the rest – behind the plastic panel is a metal panel which slots into the gap between the chassic and plastic panel. This might be quite a novelty for modders since it would be rather easy to change this… to what I’m not sure but then I guess I’m just not that creatively minded.

Closing thoughts

I hope I’ve covered mostly everything by now, so I’ll take this oppurtunity to sum up my feelings. I have to admit I was expecting a rather more poorly constructed case than this one, since my other two cases are a Lian Li PC-60 and a Cooler Master ATCS-220. What I in fact got with the SF-561 is a very well made case almost worthy of it’s more expensive peers. The Super Flower has everything you need from a case coupled with rather dashing looks (subjective, obviously) and fashionable flashy windows (also highly subjective) but without the large price premium normally associated with cases with these kinds of features.

At time of going to press the 561 is not listed on ebuyers website but the somewhat similar “rhythmic” cases are on site for sub-£30. I would expect this case to cost a little more than that, probably somewhere around £40-50. Obviously that’s my best “guess-timate” and only time will tell. But if that is your price range, and this case does indeed come in at that cost, I would definately recommend it – the Cooler Master Centurion which retails at around the same price range is nothing like as efficient or well made as this case (I had one.. I passed it on!)

A lovely case, a really rather pleasant surprise from Super Flower. To close, some pictures of the case doing what it does best – looking pretty (sorry about the beige DVD drive!!!!)

Good construction
Clean yet attractive design
Easy to work with
Decent cooling capability
Good contender to “the big boys”, at a much lower cost
No protective plastic on the window panels
Lots of curious little scratches or fractures
No PSU included (an extra cost to consider)
Shipment issues (which are hopefully unlikely to happen to UK retail buyers)

Related:
Super Flower homepage.
eBuyer, UK reseller.