Aspire X-QPack: A Lanparty Dream
by Joshua Buss on July 2, 2005 1:15 PM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
Final Words
For anyone who has ever attended several lan parties, they know how much of a drag it can be to lug around a massive steel tower case fully loaded with multiple drives and other components galore. Shuttle will forever be famous for attempting to break this tradition of 'large' desktop cases, but for a lot of people their small form factor designs simply didn't allow for enough expansion, and others simply couldn't swallow the concept of getting a case that already came with a motherboard pre-selected for it.
Well with this new design from Aspire, buyers have yet another choice available to them. They can have a case that's still much more compact and portable than a standard tower case, but one that still provides 90% of the same functionality provided the user selects an appropriate micro ATX motherboard. With more and more people interested in smaller computers, motherboard manufacturers are going to continue to come up with new and improved micro ATX layouts that offer just as much power as their full-sized counterparts. Also, with so many devices getting put onto either the motherboard itself or into external devices rather than expansion cards, many users simply don't need as many expansion slots as they used to in order to get the same amount of functionality out of their PC.
In the heat and noise arena, the case does very well. We figured a maximum ambient air temperature of 28.3 degrees Celsius, and it kept our decent gaming rig's components each within relatively low ranges. Running full force we only measured a sound pressure level of 44 dBa, certainly low enough to not be a problem for the majority of users.
Considering one can get the X-QPack for $90, and that this comes with the 420 watt power supply, we simply could not recommend this case any higher for someone who wants a micro-ATX compatible case that doesn't cut many corners.
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SilthDraeth - Sunday, July 3, 2005 - link
In response to my above post, I simply mean to convey that if this case does well at heat disipation, and providing a well designed, thoughtful case for the microATX formfacter, then the only disadvanage you could say it has compared to say a microBTX or any other small form factor design, would be the inability to support those motherboards. In all things buy what works best for you.SilthDraeth - Saturday, July 2, 2005 - link
Anyone that reads Porkster's comments knows he is anti AMD. But Porkster, if not micro atx, then what form factor?slashbinslashbash - Saturday, July 2, 2005 - link
I agree, great review. I too have been thinking about building a SFF PC, and this case adds a lot of options. I especially like that it can handle extra PCI slots and 2 optical drives. The handle is pretty cool too :)Tamale - Saturday, July 2, 2005 - link
I dunno man.. with cases this well designed and intel under so much fire I think atx is here for a long time yet to comeNordicNINE - Saturday, July 2, 2005 - link
#20, I was thinking of using that board for a Media Center PC since it has a DX9 video onboard.I had one earlier for a client and played with it a bit before hand. Plenty for a HTPC (MCE2k5) machine.
I wish it had a DVI port though since I want to get a DLP TV later this year.
porkster - Saturday, July 2, 2005 - link
Pity it's ATX. It's a bit late int he day to be making ATX cases..
kaborka - Saturday, July 2, 2005 - link
I've had my eye on the MSI microATX board with the RS480 chipset for building a HTPC. It has the onboard Radeon graphics + it's socket 939. This looks like it might be just the box for it. (Dunno if this board has 1000MHz HT, though.)NordicNINE - Saturday, July 2, 2005 - link
I was just going to buy this case.I hope this review doesn't make it harder to find. :)
Noriaki - Saturday, July 2, 2005 - link
Hey, great timing. I've been thinking about shunting my current machine as is over to a Linux box and building a brand new gaming rig. My Athlon XP2100+ is a little slow these days ;)And I would love for it to be a nice compact case for LANing. This article couldn't be better timed.
Are there any MicroATX boards that support 1000Mhz HyperTransport and the dual core Athlon 64s? I understand Via's chipset is a bit sketchy on A64x2s, and the K8M800 is 800 HT only I believe.
Tamale - Saturday, July 2, 2005 - link
lot of good questions here... I'll try to answer as many as possible..first off, yes, I wish I could've put in a more detailed review of the power supply itself - I'm currently working on getting a testbed that would be much more stressful to see how power supplies will stand up to it.
as far as dimensions, stromgald is right that it has the right mounting hole positions but that it's just shallower.. if you had a particularly shallow optical drive and/or were careful with the cables you could probably use a normal PSU.
I did have two hard drives installed at the end.. the seagate (sata) is behind the western digital (pata).. this was my attempt at putting as much of a load on the power supply as I could and seeing how the case handled the extra heat.
my comment about the excess cable clutter was simply an attempt to say that if our motherboard had the headers for extra usb/firewire cables I could've routed those cables to the appropriate places on the mobo instead of just cramming them up front.
I hope to get a system for testing power supplies in a much more informational manner very soon.