3R Mstation HT-1100 (cont’d)
To begin the installation of our test bed, we first attached the mounting plate to our modular power supply, and then secured the plate with an attached PSU to the exhaust duct with two screws.
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Compared to other cases in this roundup, this power supply install was just as easy, but unfortunately, if any switches are on the back your power supply, as is the case with ours, they will be virtually inaccessible once the unit is installed. We were able to put our MadDog unit in “quiet mode” by barely removing the supply (enough to push the switch with a thin screwdriver) while the unit was running, but it wasn’t a “user friendly” move by any means.
Next, we placed our optical drive and hard drive into the drive cage, only to realize that it’s actually much simpler to put the hard drive in after the cage and optical drive have been installed into the case.
The only downside to this approach, however, is that the mount points on the right side of the hard drive become almost impossible to get at, but if cable routing isn’t a problem between the cage and the power supply, the hard drive could go into the bottom position as well. One would just have to be sure that it doesn’t get too close to the motherboard to make cable attachments difficult.
An oddity of our DFI motherboard is that the board only has one IDE channel connector, and it’s lined up along the side of the board, making installation into same cases particularly difficult. In the HT-1100, it is pretty much impossible to install the DFI board with an IDE drive, so we used our serial ATA optical drive and hard drive instead.
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Other than our side-mounted IDE channel, the full-size ATX board fits without any problems. One snarl that we did run into, however, was that we had to remove the single 70mm exhaust fan before the motherboard could be laid down. This probably wouldn’t have been an issue had we installed the motherboard before the other components, but it wasn’t that big of a deal anyway.
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The final steps of installing our video card and connecting all the cables were easy enough, thanks to the familiar layout and abundant space inside the Mstation. Even our rather large Golden Orb II cooler fits without problems. All in all, the install process in the HT-1100 is smooth, straight-forward, and simple.
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In addition to the chassis, this case comes with a remote to control common routines in Windows Media Center Edition.
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The remote has more than enough features to get the most out of your HTPC, and the cursor controller pad in particular has a nice layout for the best ease-of-use.
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Tamale - Tuesday, November 22, 2005 - link
The 'POS' power supply happens to deliver steadier voltages to the highest-end gear I've gotten my hands on (and no, the P4 test bed isn't the most powerful thing I've tested it in) than anything else that's passed through my hands, and that includes over a dozen power supplies by high-end manufacturers. I'm no reviewer of power supplies yet, as we're still working on that, but I guarantee you that this is a fine unit, especially for the area of case reviews, because in quiet mode it does a fantastic job of staying silent enough to hear the case fans and still provides rock-solid voltages to a stressed-out system. It also gets warm when in quiet mode in the cases that don't ventilate the power supply well enough, which is another good measure of a case. Perhaps most important however is the modular nature of the unit, and even though I've tried other modular units none were as quiet as the MadDog.Secondly, the thermaltake golden orb II at full voltage is quieter than any of zalman's coolers at full voltage. While I understand that the zalman will probably get lower temperatures, It is absolutely essential that the CPU cooler in my test bed make as little noise as possible, and the golden orb II does just that.
The recurring theme in your post seems to me to be that you want 'the perfect HTPC', but the whole idea of a case review is to isolate everything but the case as much as possible, and sometimes hotter components do a better job of illustrating the deficiencies of units than the latest and greatest.
Trust me on this one, if we used the absolute best gear available the comparisons would be much muddier.
As for the subjective comment, my scale of 1-10 can be thought of as a scale of tolerance.. with 5 basically being the threshold... anything higher than that really is 'too loud for the given application' and anything lower than 4 is 'acceptable'. It's not meant to be a numerically accurate scale of any sort. I felt very comfortable with the final subject ratings I gave these cases, because the Tenor and PC-800B just barely passed my personal threshold test, and I believe most users will agree.
tayhimself - Tuesday, November 22, 2005 - link
I hope you realize other PSUs are likely quieter and more efficient than "Mad Dog". Sure the may be quiet to your ears, but thats too subjective to really mean anything. Sadly, you rate the modular nature as being an important issue when it is not. The PSU getting warm in quiet mode may be a sign of a PSU not getting enough airflow.And you say "its silent enough to hear case fans". While that can be true, the PSU and Tt golden orb noise signatures can drown out subtler differences between the cases in terms of noise of the case fans. This is almost obvious from your review as you dont perceive the difference of 9 dB to be significant. Its better to use quality quiet components so you can tell what the case is contributing to the noise spectrum. Since this is about making case buying decisions, the other factors are best isolated.
Avalon - Tuesday, November 22, 2005 - link
Get crackin'.mrgq912 - Tuesday, November 22, 2005 - link
to tired to read the article but first post.mrgq912 - Tuesday, November 22, 2005 - link
okay now that I have that out of my system. How come you guys never review stuff from alienware or voodoopc. Those guys make HTPC's aswell. I never every heard of the players in this review making HTPC's untill today. Well nice to know i have options.Would buy one if i could, untill then i will live with my ati tv wonder elite.
ksherman - Tuesday, November 22, 2005 - link
uh, cuz Alienware and Voodoo are over priced peices of DooDoo... and because this site is more geared around people that build their own machines...