Power supplies are a big factor in overclocking that not a lot of people pay much attention to. If your power supply is not able to give your hardware adequate power you will be less successful with your overclock. A lot of people think that just because a power supply is not a brand name that it isn’t good, that is not always the case. I installed this power supply into my big system which has the below specs.
Test Bed
- EPoX 8K3A+
- 1800+ Athlon XP
- 80GB Maxtor ATA133 HDD
- Corsair 512MB XMS3200
- 3DPower Geforce 3
- Cooler Master ATC-101-SX2
- Zalman 300w PSU
- Sound Blaster Live! Value
- ATi TV Wonder VE
- 10/100 NIC
- Plextor 40x12x40 CDRW
- pioneer 16x DVD
I wanted to test this power supply that came with the case so I loaded up Motherboard Monitor and set it to refresh every second. The main concern for most power supplies is the 5v line because that’s what AMD CPUs use the most, so that will be the main focus of the testing. I let my system idle so that the CPU usage would be at 0% and watched the voltages. The 5v line did stayed solid at 5.05v the whole time and did not fluctuate at all. I then loaded up Prime95 and ran the torture test to bump the CPU usage up to 100%. I again watched the 5v line carefully and the lowest it went at any time was 5.00v which is excellent.
After this power supply did so well in the initial testing I wanted to see what it was really capable of. I rebooted and overclocked my 1.6GHz Athlon XP 1800+ to 1737MHz (11.5×150) which is a pretty decent overclock. Like before I let my computer idle for a few minutes and watched the voltage readings. Even with my system overclocked the 5v line did not go below 5.03v with 0% CPU usage which is impressive, but let’s give the CPU some work and see how it does. I again ran Prime95 and watched the 5v drop a little to 4.97v which is nothing to be concerned about at all, it is actually really good.
I did not install a system to the case as I felt there was not much need due to the fact that the chassis is exactly the same as that of both Enermax cases I previously reviewed. So instead I installed the cold cathode to the case because I wanted to see how it looked through this window. If you are wondering how I got the cold cathode to turn out without having a motherboard installed, its simple. All you have to do to power up any ATX power supply without a motherboard is connect the green wire to any one of the six black wires on the motherboard power connector and plug the power supply in which is shown below. I hooked everything up and turned it on and man is it an impressive sight, the cold cathode is very bright and looks really good though the window. The back of the case also looks really cool with the light shining out of all the little holes.
Conclusion
Once again I am very impressed with this style of case, and this one more so than the Enermax ones. This case has some good features, cool design, and comes with a 350w power supply which is really nice. The inside of the case is really nice because there are no sharp edges and there are plenty of hard drive bays.
Front USB seems to be a standard now with cases which is a really good thing and am happy to see finally happening. The window on this case looks pretty cool and if you do not want to install a window yourself this case would be a great one for you. The only real negative aspects to this case are the fan grill cutouts which can easily be fixed with a Dremel and the fact that there is no removable motherboard tray.
The cold cathode that comes with this case makes it even better than expected and adds a lot of personality to it. I would really recommend this case to someone who wants a cool looking case without having to do a lot of work to get it that way. If you are looking for a case which has mod potential I probably would not suggest this one for you due to the fact that a good amount of modding has already been done to it.
Overall I am going to give this case a 9/10 and award it the OCmodshop seal of approval. I would like to thank Koolcases for sending this case over to review. Head on over there and check our their huge line of cases and case mods.
Pros
- Preinstalled window
- Lots of places for fans
- Front USB
- 350w power supply
- No sharp edges
- Switch and mounting template provided
Cons
- No removable motherboard tray
- Poor fan grill cutouts
