| Article Index |
|---|
| Antec VSK-2000 New Solution Series Case Review |
| The Exterior |
| The Interior |
| Installation |
| The Tests |
| Conclusion |
| All Pages |
Installation
Equipment
I wanted to test this thing out with the latest and greatest gear, but its a budget case and hence I was limited to budget hardware. Still I managed to get this gear into it:
- ASUS P5N-T Deluxe Motherboard
- Intel Celeron 2.2GHz
- Transcend 4GB DDR2 RAM
- Seagate 500GB HDD
- Sapphire Radeon HD4350
- Samsung SH-S223F DVD Burner
- ThermalTake 430W PSU
- Optional: 2 x XigmaTek 120mm fans
As I mentioned before, its all about manually doing things the good old way, no special slots for drives, but it doesn’t take long to get screws in and you feel like you are saving money by removing the luxury of premade slots.
Cabling
It does get very cramped with cables here and there, but I did manage to get them neatly out of the way after about 30minutes of fiddling.
However, the Audio cable from the front I/O Panel was one of the last cables I was connecting and unfortunately it wasn’t long enough. All other cables from the panel had fit with a small amount of room to spare, but this one Audio cable had to cross the motherboard diagonally and still did not reach. I was told Gigabyte motherboard designs would be better suited for this case and ASUS not so good, but sadly it would only take another 2centimetres and I could have connected the ASUS board in.
The motherboard was a full sized ATX and fit perfectly as well as the PSU, GPU, HDD and DVD Drive, basically everything seemed fine to fit in this case. When in discussion however, I was informed it has a problem with Micro ATX, so I decided to investigate.
MicroATX
As you can see, when I put a Micro ATX board in the case, it fits, but there’s no support for the outer edges of the board, no screw holes at all. A motherboard with no expansion cards would survive, but adding GPU and other cards may put weight and stress on the Micro ATX.
The "Bulge" didn’t bother me, and I thought it lent an edgy look, along with the Sarge pattern. The front 3.5" trap door is awkward, and I can’t think of a real use for it, but fun to flip when you're bored - lol. Did you note the front indent that looks like an "Eject" button to the left of the trap door? Has no use, just a 'shape' on the face... could confuse lame End Users (aka customers).
I miss the silicon drive mount option to reduce vibration, but it's a budget case.
I used a full size Gigabyte ATX MoBo so the standoffs were not an issue. I had an extra Antec 500W PSU lying around from another build, and used it here... fit perfectly.
Finally, my only let down, was th...