Hardware Akasa Euler Review

Akasa is putting plenty of effort into a range of new fanless cases that take advantage of new slim motherboards.
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cases/2013/07/23/akasa-euler-review/1

 

Am I missing something here?

"The Euler might lack USB ports and the ability to install an optical drive (you could always buy a USB hub and external optical drive)"

How are you going to connect that USB hub without any USB ports? Direct to the motherboard?

 

What a fantastic concept. I really like it.
Are the motherboard side support stands adjustable?
Not all processors and boards and sockets are going to be exactly the same thickness, resulting in...well board bend possibly?

Anyway the boards are so tiny, have no cables and no cards, so mounting them by the cooler only should be perfectly fine.

To the motherboard backplane, it has no extra case-USB-ports, it still has the external USB ports that come with the motherboard (look at the picture with a mounted motherboard)

 

Ahh yes. Thought I must have been magooing!

 

A bit of a contrived test I know but it would be very interesting to see what these cases perform like with a dusting of... um... dust. Most people would place it somewhere and then forget about it. So I think it would be very useful to see how dust affects it's cooling abilities.

 

kind of illustrates just how out of touch AMD are, power wise

 

The 35W variants likely don't sell that well - they are either specialized and binned to hell and back (Core) or crippled (Pentium) - the Core variants are expensive as hell, the Pentiums are cheap(er) and, well, crippled.

For way less, you can get AMD's Bobcat-derived (and soon Jaguar) parts that will likely serve as well for anything you're likely to throw at this sort of box.

As far as the specialty case manufacturers not supporting the AMD parts - well, that's at least half on those manufacturers, isn't it? (the other half being AMD not apparently commanding the marketshare to the point the case manufacturters feel the need, I'll concede).

However, in the wider market - yeah, no one can really argue that AMD better get off their ass and do something about the power consumption problem they have. A node or two behind notwithstanding, they've still got a problem there.

 

i'm loving the idea of this case with the new 45W APU's like the trinity based 6700T.

all we need is a thin-ITX FM2(+) board, have any been announced as of yet?

 

Going to try one of these with a Pentium G2120 (TDP:55W) ... No way I'm paying twice as much for a 35W i3.

If anyone else out there is looking for a thin ITX board to put in one of these cases, which features an S/PDIF output (as I have been) I can advise Intel's DQ77BK does indeed have one but it's undocumented. The headphone jack is a combined 3.5mm jack line out/mini-TOSlink connector, but this is not mentioned anywhere in the documentation or spec sheets.

https://communities.intel.com/thread/31518

EDIT: Seems that in order to keep this functionality you need to stay on the original BIOS (v38). I tried updating to the latest BIOS and it was disabled. There's no reference in the BIOS release notes to indicate when the feature was disabled, so no doubt there is a more recent version with it enabled but everything seems to work fine on 38, so I've just left it.