New Workstation- Part 1 Antec P182 Case
posted in Hardware, Technology |I’ve got my new workstation built and am writing on it at the moment. The hardware part is all done I think so its time to start some observations while I get all my software installed and setup.
Before I go onto details of the build and some comments on the parts, I’ll mention that I did manage to overclock it to 4.0ghz (quad core), which I think is pretty cool. I suspect I’ll bring it back to 3.66ghz or so in a bit to run a little cooler since that extra little bit doesn’t actually matter, but as a milestone it was pretty fun ti hit. If I think about it, I had my first 3ghz machine probably 4 or 5 years ago and I think I got a 3.6ghz machine 3 years ago just about this time of year. Of course that was the old slower P4 architecture and only single-core (although HyperThreaded), so this machine is probably well over 4x the performance of those machines.
The Antec P182 Case
Overall I’m very disappointed with the Antec P182 case that I got. Before I get into the details lets say that this is a big case. It has 6+ 3.5″ drive bays, 4 5.25″ drive bays, and is supposed to have plenty of room for everything. Overall the situation for PC cases is just pitiful. Compared to the Mac Pro they all are pretty bad. You get the gamer-cases that are all dressed up with wacky windows and plastic demon skulls. And you get other cases that various people tried to design but pretty much none of them are done with any skill or taste.
This case is for my new main workstation. This is going to be a high performance computer and I’m starting with 4 hard-drives although only a couple of PCI cards (video and sound). The case needs to provide for clean cabling, good cooling, not be super-loud (but my office already has enough fans that it doesn’t need to be silent or anything) and I’d like it to look decent.
So to recap, I’m looking for-
- Plenty of space
- Easy expandability
- Looks decent
- Good cooling
- Not loud
Empty Antec P182 case before install
The parts for the computer came in a few at a time, so I started putting things together before everything arrived. The power-supply goes in the bottom of the P182. Pretty quickly I’m hitting trouble as its a real pain to jam the thing in there. Even worse, there is a nice fan in the bottom in between the bottom drive-bay and the power-supply, but its getting in the way of the cables coming out of the power supply. Later on I end up having to take this fan out because the situation is even worse on the drive side, with the drive cables (power and SATA) are impossible to get out of jamming the fan. The picture to the left is before I removed the fan and you can see how tight it is.
Again, let me point out that this is a very big case. Not the biggest, but its the biggest I have. In a SFF system you can excuse a certain amount of jamming things in. In a large tower case the designers are supposed to have figured this stuff out so that things can be put together without creating a problem.
This may be a situation where the case designers have not caught up yet with modern parts. I suspect it might work with old IDE style drives but the SATA connectors stick straight out more and need more room behind the drive bay. To be clear, with the Antec P182 its hard to not bend your SATA power connectors to the point where they break. This picture shows the drive bay with out the fan- the metal bar at the top of the picture is where the fan would be and you can see how much the power cables would be bent if it were still there.
Another issue (which points to a similar blind spot) is that all the fans have old-IDE style power connectors rather than headers which attach to the motherboard. These are bigger and mean that your motherboard can’t monitor and control the fan speed. The case has some nice external switches that let you adjust fan speed, but the ideal situation is to have the motherboard automatically adjust it based on the internal temperatures so it can crank up when you are gaming and run quiet the rest of the time.
The fit for the motherboard itself is also fairly tight, again given the size of the overall case. There are some baffles that let you separate out the bottom power-supply/drive section from the main section, but they get in the way of the bottom of the motherboard (where Asus puts the USB/Firewire and front-panel connectors).
Finally, if you get this motherboard you need to make sure that your power-supply has a long enough 12V cable. Normal cases put the power-supply at the top of the case which will end up being close to where the 12V connector is on the motherboard, so the power-supplies tend to not make this cable long enough. The P182 does make a nice provision to run the main power-connectors behind the motherboard to keep them out of the way of the expansion cards, cooling, but my 12V cable was at least 4″ too short and so I couldn’t actually get things working inside the case until I bought an extension. You can see the extension cable in the bottom right of the picture. This part from Amazon is exactly what you need to fix this situation-
The last thing that was a trouble during install was that I couldn’t figure out how to mount my DVD drive in the external bays. I was probably just being stupid but the manual is (as usual) horrible at providing any useful information on this stuff. It was not clear whether you insert the drive from the inside or the outside, other than that the inside is blocked by the motherboard. My first attempt to insert it from the outside got stuck because I put the mounting rails on backwards- it turns out that the clips go towards the outside of the case which (to me) is non-obvious.
Finally, some observations on the case now that it is all put together. Overall once it is put together it seems very nice. The big thing I’d look for differently is that it is a pain having the DVD drive inside a fold-out door. To insert/remove disks you need to open the door and put it in. I’d much rather just have external access to the drive so the front-door thing ends up being a pain overall.