Arctic Cooling Silentium T1

Installation

Here you can see drama we alluded to earlier. According to the manual "each cable is assigned a specific component and is only long enough for this function." Annoyingly, while the manual specifically shows a SATA drive oriented as shown (above left) their drive still used a 4-pin molex plug for power, plugged into the second hole at the bottom.

Since our Seagate Barracuda is a more modern SATA drive, it uses the SATA power connector. There is only one from the PSU and it is so short, the drive must be oriented facing the other way. This caused particular headaches because having inserted the drive into the screwless cage, we then couldn't remove it from this side - the friction was too great. Annoyingly, we had to remove the entire PSU assembly (again) in order to flip the drive around. As you can see from the photos, this requires the removal of the motherboard as well, if you have already screwed that in place at this point as we had.


Choosing a test system for this case proved more troublesome than we first thought. The manual clearly states At 350 Watt continuous power the power supply is well proportioned and will provide sufficient power for the highest demands for many years to come. Numerous in house and independent tests have proven that today's PC consumes at most 230 Watt (P4 3.8 GHz, Geforce 6800 Ultra).


Fair enough we thought - let's try our Intel Extreme Edition 3.73GHz processor and a GeForce 7900 GTX. At 90nm, the latest barnstormer from NVIDIA consumes about the same power as the 130nm GeForce 6800 Ultra. As it turned out, this combination simply drew too much power to boot - the fans would kick in but the system would not otherwise turn on.

As the PSU lacked the necessary PCI-Express power leads (we used an adapter) we wondered if the 7900 GTX was the cause. It is certainly a very tight squeeze to fit a full-length card inside the case, thanks to the HDD Muffler, so maybe the PSU was never designed for something so thirsty. We dropped down to a GeForce 7600 GT - a mid-range card that requires no external power - but again the system failed to boot.

Having verified no other faults by booting up using a 600W OCZ PowerStream PSU, we abandoned any aspirations of installing a high-end gaming rig. Instead we fell back to decent office worker-type specification: an Athlon 64 3500+, 2GB of Corsair RAM and a passively-cooled ATI Radeon X700. CPU-cooling duties fell to the awesome Zalman CNPS9500.

Expansion cards

On a more positive note, one innovative feature of the case is a completely tool-less solution for securing expansion cards. Normally this would involve tiny case screws or possibly thumbscrews but instead, Arctic Cooling has opted for a clamp that spans the full seven slots. Simply release it using the two external tabs, slot in your graphics card and any other expansion cards and close the clamp. It is a neat solution that also proved completely secure.