Originally posted by: grahamk
The cards I'd like to have on board are:
1. Turtle Beach Catalina Sound Card...
3. Firewire card...
Asus P5K-VM is a G33 chipset board that has Firewire and HD Audio, so you don't need your old Catalina and a separate Firewire card. I know, I have a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz collecting dust in the garage... loved that card, but had to move on. I cannot tell a difference in 2-channel sound quality between a Chaintech AV-710 (VIA Envy24HT chipset) and HD Audio (on a Gigabyte P965-DS3) - that was the before-to-after sound solutions for my Wife's rig. Why I'm bringing it up is that she uses a home theater receiver with a powered 12" Advent subwoofer and a pair of BIC Venturi V52 speakers. Sounds great! She would complain if it didn't.
To keep this thread on track (or else I'd have to move/lock it :evil: ) I will point out a new build I'm doing for someone. It uses
this Silverstone TJ08 case and the Asus P5K-VM board. The board has a rear Firewire port, plus the case has a front Firewire port, HD Audio ports and FOUR USB ports. The motherboard had headers to handle all of them. Hmmm, looks like Directron bumped pricing by $10 since I bought it last week, but still is $20 less than Newegg. The case looks really nice and is super compact. It may be a bit difficult to work with because of the small size, so if you're not comfortable with squeezing excess power cables into drive bays, then I'd suggest a modular PSU. I used an Antec EarthWatts 500W and filled the bottom 5¼" bay with excess power cables. The case comes with two 120mm fans that run 1200RPM. Reasonably quiet, but not anywhere silent so if you want silent then perhaps undervolt them. The fan grills are extremely free flowing.
I should take pics... I'll be back and edit my post.
BTW Athenatech makes a case with the same chassis for about half the price with a "450W" power supply (not very good quality). The Silverstone version has a much nicer front and much better fan grills.
EDIT: Here are pics...
Front of system
Yeah, the plastic DVDRW face doesn't quite match the nice black aluminum. I wonder if it'll match better with a gloss coating? The bottom mesh is a perforated metal sheet backed by a filter of some sort. It is free flowing enough to be see-through if held up to the light. At the very bottom are the Firewire, four USB and HD Audio ports. Why I state "HD Audio" is that I still encounter a lot of cases that are wired for AC'97, and with a lot of boards you won't get any sound out of the front ports with a board using HD Audio. This case has BOTH types wired, so you can go either. As a bonus, the Asus board I'm using with it can be switched to either one in BIOS. Between the power and reset buttons are the power and HDD LEDs. Both are ultrabrigth blue.
Rear angle view
Those are the stock 120mm fans and fan grills, so you can see how free flowing it is. The motherboard is pretty nice, having 1x PS/2 keyboard port, six USB ports, one Firewire port, one coaxial SPDIF output, gigabit Ethernet, 6 analog audio outputs, a parallel and a VGA port. Look underneath the optical drive to see where I wedged almost all of the power cables.
Side view
The front port cables are just left at the bottom. Messy looking? Maybe, but this case has no side window and they're not in the way of anything down there. The black cables are audio and Firewire, blue cables are USB, rainbow is for the LEDs/buttons. Video card is an 8800GT. Motherboard is ready for Wolfdales (got an E3110 running in my own Asus P5K-VM). There's still one USB port headers unused, which can go for front panel devices or whatever. There's specifically an SPDIF connector headers for use with HDMI video cards (of course the Asus motherboard manual pointed out that it works great with Asus video cards). The bottom expansion slot is a 4x PCI-E and two middle are PCI, so you (the OP) can put a dual HDTV tuner in the PCI-E slot and a wireless card in the bottom PCI slot, and still have room next to the video card in case you use a double slot cooler. Speaking of double slot coolers, this Asus board is one of the best mATX Intel boards in that respect because the four SATA ports are not blocked by dual slot coolers since they're a bit further down on the board. The 3½" drive bay is removable, but the front blanks are attached to it so you can't just leave it out. The noisiest part about this system is probably the hard drive (Maxtor/Seagate 7200.10). The seeks are incredibly loud. I've been spoiled by using Antec cases with their newer white soft silicone grommets for HDD mounting. If this case can be modified to use those grommets (or suspend the HDD), then it will be MUCH better for low noise. Another thing is that the SATA cables stick out pretty far. This would be a perfect use of "L" shaped SATA power and data cable plugs. The case is wide enough and there's just enough room to use big coolers like the Scythe Ninja, though for this build I'm doing a stock retail boxed cooler. Note how little space is between the PSU and the optical drive. Seriously there's about 2-3" between them. The PSU is about the shortest "normal" ATX size, and the optical is an NEC/Optiarc which is pretty short.
Note that the motherboard tray is removable from the other side, making it MUCH easier to install a motherboard.
Here's the Athenatech version of the case. Newegg no longer has it in stock. The chassis is EXACTLY THE SAME as the Silverstone TJ-08 except for these differences:
- Side panel on the TJ-08 does not have the CPU fan duct.
- Front face is different on the TJ-08, made out of aluminum instead of plastic.
- 120mm fan grills are stamped into the chassis on the Athenatech, while the Silverstone is completely cut out and uses wire finger guards making it 500% better!
- Silverstone doesn't come with a disposable PSU.
I've used the Athenatech case before, so I'm not just talking out my ass either.
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