A mate of mine at uni has offered me £50 for my Yeong Yang server cube, and I'm considering selling up and replacing it with the Antec Titan case - it'll be easier to work on and I fancy a change - the YY cube is probably a bit too big for my uses and to be honest I've always thought that its damned ugly! The Titan seems to be the ideal replacement - room for 6 hard drives (the max that I'll need in my main rig), good cooling (1x120mm and 2x92mm), better looking than the cube, and is still large enough that i won't be short of room (a bugbear of mine is really cramped cases, the cube was a revelation in this respect but much of its extra space is wasted - I have no use at all for all of its 6 5.25 bays for example, and in the motherboard side the extra space is of no practical use whatsoever unless you're water cooling). So I'm asking if anyone has this case, and if so, what they think of it...and any alternative cases people might suggest?
Stacker is fugly, and the grills mean noise gets out and dust gets in . Very nice modular design though. Silverstones are nice but a bit expensive for my taste (had expensive aluminium cases before and loved them, but I can't really afford a coolermaster/silverstone/lian li these days ). I'll be ordering one of these beastie Antecs within the next couple of days anyway, as my mate has definitely agreed to buy the Cube off me I'll let you know how I find it as there only seems to be one fairly limited review on the Titan available at the moment.
Too bad; I love the TJ05, and the TJ06 looks to be pretty good too (should be getting one this week in fact )
Well it turned up on Monday but I didn't get much of a chance to look at it until yesterday as I had a 3500 word essay on Al-Qaeda to write First impressions of the case are good, the case is a proper black for a start - unlike the YY Cube or other cases which are more of a dark grey colour which is much less attractive IMHO. Excuse the quality of the photos, the w800i camera isn't the best... Build quality is up to the usual high Antec standard, although the side panels do seem slightly flexible (this down more to their large size though - this case is not very tall, only about 2 inches taller than the cube on wheels, but its *very* deep). First thing I did was switch the case LEDs (5mm as normal) to blue and white ones. The depth of the case is specifically so that it can take E-ATX motherboards for dual cpu setups, but also means with a normal ATX board you have loads of space around the board, avoiding the annoyance of having hard drive cables butting up against your video card, something which especially annoys me given I have 5 hard drives in the system so end up with a rats nest of cables which get in the way every time I want to switch out a component. Access to the case is easy enough by the usual 4 screws (on the left hand side they're thumbscrews). To remove hard drives, the front of the case unclips easily and you're faced with this... Undo the two thumbscrews and a door can be opened, taking the two (not included, sadly) 92mm fans with it...see here! Hard drives are mounted on rails and can slide out the front here. Obviously its not as good as true server style SCA as you have to unplug the cables in the normal fashion inside the case, but its a hell of a lot easier to install/remove drives in this way as you don't have to wrestle with them inside the case where its often cramped and getting a drive into its cage is made awkward by the graphics card getting in the way and so on. With the system fully installed, theres still plenty of space around the motherboard so access to jumpers doesn't require dwarf hands unless you fancy breaking something Overall then, a good case. The drive rails for 5.25 and especially 3.5 inch devices make fitting drives a breeze, whilst the depth of the case means space around mostareas of the motherboard is plentiful. Looks wise, it reminds me a bit of the old Chieftec dragons, maybe a bit more industrial but to my eyes thats no bad thing (server cases rock ). I much prefer this to the YY Cube, which is a hard case to work on as everything uses a vast number of screws, and with a lot of hard drives the drive bay side of the cube case becomes a rats nest of wires as everything is so close together - the Titan is a much more intelligent design for a server case IMHO, and whilst you can't get quite as much hardware in it, how many people really need 6 optical drives anyway?!
tis looking very pweddy indeed ...whilst Antec cases might not be the cream of the crop, I have been very impressed with their build quality, and durability, and due to that my last three cases have been by antec! Is the actual case wider then the standard (if there is such a thing) or just a bit longer (deeper if you like...) I guess the only reason for having 6 of the 5.25 bays, would be if you had hdd racks in 4 of them, which is not that a bad idea edit. do you not just love it how these come with big fans in mind as standard, rather then the puny 60 or 80mms which can be so annoying on the high frequencies...that was probably the main driving factor with my new antec, 2 120mms...
Yep its a bit wider as well as deeper (longer), it has to though really to accomodate a 120mm exhaust fan. You could put 4 HDDs in racks to fill up the YY Cube's CD bays, but I hate to think what the cable management would me like - the gap between the two chambers (one for drives and PSU, one for motherboard etc, for those unfamilar with the layour of the YY Cube) through which you can thread cables is tight enough as it, when I had 6 S-ATA drives and 2 optical drives it was bad enough. In theory you could put 2 optical drives, 8HDDs in the 3.5 bays, and 4 more in racks in the cube...but the cabling would be almost unmanageable IMHO, just plugging it all in would prove difficult let alone having to remove anything without taking the whole lot out Don't get me wrong, the Cube is a nice case but when you get past how big it is and how different its design is, you start to realise its pretty flawed in some ways!
well, the cube is pretty, well in terms of technology, damn old now...remember colvins cube when he first modded it...hardcore back then, possibly a bit dated now... ...I have to admit, the case looks very tempting as my antec is getting a tad small now with 4 hdds, and with a scsi to be added at xmas, and the possibilty (well I like the idea) of watercooling, I might have to upgrade the case once more...do you mind enlightening where it can be bought and how much??
I got mine from overclock.co.uk, cost me £57 or so delivered including VAT...nice price for the case I reckon, given the cube without a PSU costs about £100 at its cheapest. Most other retailers (OcUK, Ebuyer etc) only sell them with an Antec 550w PSU as well, which means they cost £150 or so. I already have a good PSU (Enermax 600w) so being able to buy 'just the case' was perfect, but overclock seem to be the only place that sell it sans PSU
Cheers -H_, made my day (I know its not your fault they dropped the price mate, just frustrating to see its dropped so soon and so much after buying one at the higher price...case prices are usually pretty static). A steal for £35 inc vat IMHO, this case
Lol mate, thought you might react like that. I'm *so* tempted to get one now, even though I have no system to put it in.
i feel your pain will just bought my 7800gt and proccesor to find them a total of £44/$77 cheaper a few days later -_- ... just have to accept the bad luck and move on... for some people (like me) there will never be good luck jake
