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Date |
: May 1st, 2002 |
| Category |
: Various |
| Manufacturer |
: Various |
| Author |
: Jin-Wei Tioh |
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The very first step is deciding on which platform do you want to build. There are 3 prevailing standards - MicroATX, FlexATX and VIA's newly introduced ITX, with MicroATX being the largest and ITX being the smallest. However, these labels seem to be somewhat of a misnomer. There are pure solutions, eg. the case, motherboard and power supply are MicroATX compliant, and there are mixed solutions as in the case of our choice. It all comes down to how much are you willing to trade off - size vs. features. MicroATX motherboards typically sport more expansion slots (even standard AGP!) than their FlexATX counterparts, but of course have larger dimensions.
I decided to go with a hybrid solution - MicroATX desktop case with a FlexATX power supply. This baby is a little bigger than most other hybrid cases, but it has 2 internal 3.5" bays! The mounts for the drives swing up to provide easy access, it comes with a thumbscrewed cover and has a small latch out back to keep your goodies inside safe. Construction is solid, with no sharp edges to slice and dice your fingers. There's even a pre-made blowhole right beside the main 3.5" bay to keep the system (and especially your HDD) nice and cool. It also comes with 2 small stands to stack the case vertically. Overall, I'm happy with the case. It looks pretty slick, and the lower front hatch (semi-translucent black plastic) will be modded with a backlit 16x2 or 20x2 LCD sometime in the future. Now that would be sweet! One weird (cool?) thing though is the 5V DC plug beside the power supply. I have no idea why it was placed there, but it wouldn't hurt if you're going to use it to power say an external character LCD (can you say 20x2 VFD?).
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