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Nexus Caterpillar
Silent Computer enclosure.
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| Author: |
Jouni 'Jipa' Vasama |
| Published: |
10.09.2007 |
| Manufacturer: |
Nexus
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| Product Group: |
System enclosure |
 In English
 Suomeksi
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Final assembly
Apart from the S-ATA problem the installation was pretty straight forward. There are plastic quick locks
in the PCI card slots, but other than that everything is held in place by screws. One thing I really miss in
this case is some sort of noise dampening for the HDDs and the optical drive. It's really surprising there
are no silicon pads or something for the HDDs as this tries to be a quiet case, these days they seem to be
popular even in normal cases...
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Noise
To test the noise level of the fans on the case, they were connected to a fanless powersupply. This made it easier to
listen the case fans instead of all the coolers and fans of the rig inside. During the listening two things became clear,
first of all the D12SL-12 fans are very quiet even at full 12 volts. Other thing was not that great as the rotor of the
front fan wasn't straight and caused extra noise. It's a shame one of the fans was defective, because other than that the
impressions of the noise test were positive.
Because installing the side panel was impossible, we weren't able to test the actual noise reducing
properties of the case. When using the setup open it became obvious the HDDs really need some sort of
vibration-killers as the read-noise was disturbingly loud.
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Conclusion
PROS 
Quiet fans
Noise absorption material preinstalled
CONS 
No dust filters
No HDD-silencing
No room for straight S-ATA power connectors
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Overall the Caterpillar proved to be a pretty nice case. The upside-down design works well and there were no major flaws
in the internal design. But unfortunately there are a couple of important features still missing; the dust-filter for the
front fan and the silicon pads for the HDDs. Also the position and the design of the HDD-cage could be tweaked for the future
models.
With a couple of modifications (some of which would require changing the outer dimensions, though), the
Caterpillar could be well worth the Editors Choise-award, but now it just has too many flaws. Not that they make the
case useless, far from it, but still we would have liked to see these things thought out already.
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Questions or comments? Visit MetkuMods forum.
Additional Information
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Content in english!
Sisältö suomeksi!