Usage & Performance

After the chassis' top cover was secured back on top, I hooked the system up to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. The power and reset buttons are located on the front panel, and it's necessary to have the door open to access these.

What I liked about the panel were the buttons themselves. Rather than traditional push buttons, the power and reset buttons were covered by plastic exterior, making them one with the panel.

When the system whirled to life, I was surprised to hear how loud it was. With desktop systems, manufacturers have tried so hard to achieve efficient cooling with minimum sound output. This isn't the case with many server and workstation manufacturers, as maximum cooling is the overall goal. While not insanely loud, I doubt I'd be able to fall asleep with this machine running in the same room.

Disconnecting the two intake fans, I found the sound much more bearable. However, the case temperature rose as well.

while on the topic of temperature, the case maintained a respectable temperature of 35°C, while the CPU was running at 37°C while compiling KDE4.1 on Gentoo Linux 2008.0. Without the front intakes, temperatures rose between 5° and 7°C.

Since rackmount chassis aren't often used as workstation or desktop machines, I didn't expect to find any USB ports on the front of the chassis. However, the port can come in handy when transferring files from a flash drive or temporarily add some other device to the system.