I went to my computer dealer the other day to pick up a $10 CF Card to PCMCIA adaptor and left $300 later. This happens quite often; sometimes I just can’t help myself. I had been thinking about a new case for my PC for quite some time. When I upgraded my motherboard and processor a while back the wires for the front panel USB/Firewire connectors could not reach their mates on the motherboard. In addition the old case was stuffed to capacity with two CD drives and three hard drives that I could barely get to without removing the four memory sticks.

So I happened upon the Thermaltake Armor Jr. case. The case came with 2 large cooling fans, one in front and one in back. My old case had 3 of the smaller fans which were quite noisy. A larger fan can turn slower to move the same amount of air and is thus quieter; this alone cut down the noise by about half.  

Notice the cool looking blue lights in the front panel fan? This fan is in front of the hard drive bay to cool the drives. The drives sit sideways in this case which I would guess provides better cooling and also makes it quite easy to hook up the connectors. The little wings that open and close in front look nice, but I could have done without them.  

Ok it isn’t pretty but it gets the job done. You can see in the lower right my three SATA hard drives are facing sideways and easy to reach. While I was at it I upgraded my power supply to a 750 watt Thermaltake. You can never have enough power especially with my power hungry NVIDIA 8800 video card.  

Here is a nice feature, but I wish that these connectors would have been on the front of the case…

I often use the top of my case to put things, and this will limit that practice. Overall I’m pretty happy about finally upgrading my case. This particular model was $125 and the power supply was $135. A few other odds and ends got me up to $300.

What will I do with that old case you ask? Build another computer with my old motherboard of course! 

Related posts:

1. My Maxtor Madness