good gaming case

[andywhir]

good points
========
very quiet with quiet components and fans turned on low, helped by heavy doors which absorb a lot of the noise. about the biggest advantage. when I had one rigged out with 4 hard drives, and 2x7800gtx's it was very quiet compared to when I had the same hardware in an Eclipse 62. Extra quietness was due to the heavy doors and the way the hard drives are mounted.

decent cpu cooling

good noise isolation for hard drives

3 fans provided - can run on low,medium,high - quiet on low, option to add 4th fan to aid gpu cooling


bad points
========
difficult for cable management. in fact a mess unless you are dedicated.

weighs a tonne

known build quality issues - warping front doors, sidepanel clips are plastic and can break, aluminium in sidepanel can flex and pop out...some of these problems fixed in rev2 of the case

can't fit an 8800gtx without removing upper drive bay and no chance of running 8800GTX's in sli

crappy gpu cooling even after adding the additional front fan and removing the upper hard drive bay. they removed the useless gpu duct and replaced it with vented pci slots but it doesn't seem to help. plus the doors are heavy and help with noise but also cause all that heat to build up, hence the need for 4 fans

need to make sure your 12v aux/eps cable and atx cable are long enough to reach mobo or buy extenders

the fans are actually not mounted using any type of isolation at all and are known to mysteriously buzz

cannot adjust speed of fans outside case...have to open case everytime to adjust and they are not 3pin..4pin only. A disadvantage for some.

if running sli (7 series), can be difficult to get say a soundcard into bottom pci slot of your motherboard as usually the cables running from the bottom where the psu cage is to the top of the case can block this area.

can be difficult to fix long psu's unless you remove the fan that cools the hard drives. should not be as bad now as they ship a standard 25mm thick fan on rev2 of the case.

what case are you talking about.

 

[Flanno]

The Antec P180. By the time I had my reply typed up those 2 posts about that rubbish Vento got in.

 

[paddy001]

Antec P180

I will happily without a doubt recomend the antec p180 the cooling its brilliant its dead quiet and can house a whole plethora of components however if your thinking of possibly going water cooling ever then go for the cooler master stacker or the antec 62 theres plenty of room in both for big rads which cannot be accomodated by the antec p180 since it was desinged to be air cooled.

paddy001

 

[PinkFloyd]

you been drinking tonight? EVERYONE hates the vento without a doubt

**Passes across a sarcasm detector**



From the sounds of things your after a garish "oooo look at me" case.
SO in that case pretty much anything with a large number of led fans in would be good for what you want.

Alternatively you could get a "good case" (notice the omission of gaming) and buy something that isn't going to make huge amounts of noise, yet cool less than a decent case that will last much longer and not drop in value like a stone.

 

[Hudzy]

Shame OcUK don't stock the Lian Li Snail anymore

 

[Flanno]

I will happily without a doubt recomend the antec p180 the cooling its brilliant its dead quiet and can house a whole plethora of components however if your thinking of possibly going water cooling ever then go for the cooler master stacker or the antec 62 theres plenty of room in both for big rads which cannot be accomodated by the antec p180 since it was desinged to be air cooled.

paddy001

I don't think the cooling is brilliant. It's ok, but still inefficient for what it does and I know a lot of people on these forums would agree with me and have used this case. There are other cases out there which cool better on air. As for quiet - if you use quiet components any case will be quiet. A case in itself is not quiet, unless the pc is turned off It's the components that make the noise. The case can help if it uses vibration damping for drives, thick panels to mask noise and prevent resonance which presents it's own set of problems. That's about all a case can do to help with noise.

The only thing quiet the P180 has going for it is the fact it uses anti-vib mounts for the hard drives (as do a lot of cases), and has very thick doors to mask the noise of the fans and of course it also helps the doors don't vibrate like on some cases - but then you need to turn those fans up to keep the thing cool over those thick doors, and it generally cools an sli setup pretty crapily (relative to other cases in the same price range). They first version had a vga duct when the 180 first came out, which even those pushing the P180 on SPCR said was pretty useless - even with a thin 80mm fan attached. Now they just ditched it and vented the pci-slots. Cooling is still no better in the gpu aread. If you have the cash and want something similar to the P180 but better I would recommend the Lian Li A10.