PC Club Enpower Sabre Extreme: E6600 Made Easy
by Jarred Walton on August 29, 2006 4:40 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
Externals and Appearance
The Apex case is certainly not going to win any awards for being the best case ever, but at the same time it doesn't have any serious flaws. It's pretty generic in appearance and features, but it isn't ugly by any means (at least in our opinion). It has a relatively roomy interior, it's reasonably sturdy, and it doesn't weigh too much. During operation, the system remains quiet though not entirely silent. The two 80mm fans inside the case should provide adequate cooling for the typical configuration, and the front fan helps to keep any hard drive(s) cool.
The front panel is silver while the rest of the exterior is matte black. The Enpower logo is lit by the front 80 mm fan and glows blue when the system is powered up. The top optical drive bay is occupied with a LiteOn DVD+RW LightScribe drive and has a door that matches the rest of the front. A similar door hides an empty 5.25" bay, so if you want to add a second optical drive you don't need to worry about ruining the uniformity of the front panel.
There isn't much to see on the right side of the case other than some decorative ventilation, the power/reset buttons, and the LEDs for hard drive activity and system power.
Moving to the left side, things are similar in appearance, but here the ventilation is somewhat more useful. A duct helps to channel fresh air down to the CPU fan, and there's additional ventilation over the expansion card slots. At the front of the case you can also see the two USB ports along with the headphone and microphone jacks.
At the rear of the system are all of the standard connections. The expansion slot area is empty other than the graphics card, although you could fill at least one slot with a four port USB bracket and use the remaining two onboard USB headers. Unfortunately, such an adapter with the system we were sent, though PC Club does send the motherboard box along with all of the manuals and additional cabling. This can be useful, but there isn't anything that's really required within the box. We've already covered the various ports that are included, so we won't get into further details of that area. Let's take a look at the inside.
The Apex case is certainly not going to win any awards for being the best case ever, but at the same time it doesn't have any serious flaws. It's pretty generic in appearance and features, but it isn't ugly by any means (at least in our opinion). It has a relatively roomy interior, it's reasonably sturdy, and it doesn't weigh too much. During operation, the system remains quiet though not entirely silent. The two 80mm fans inside the case should provide adequate cooling for the typical configuration, and the front fan helps to keep any hard drive(s) cool.
 |
| Click to enlarge |
The front panel is silver while the rest of the exterior is matte black. The Enpower logo is lit by the front 80 mm fan and glows blue when the system is powered up. The top optical drive bay is occupied with a LiteOn DVD+RW LightScribe drive and has a door that matches the rest of the front. A similar door hides an empty 5.25" bay, so if you want to add a second optical drive you don't need to worry about ruining the uniformity of the front panel.
 |
| Click to enlarge |
There isn't much to see on the right side of the case other than some decorative ventilation, the power/reset buttons, and the LEDs for hard drive activity and system power.
 |
| Click to enlarge |
Moving to the left side, things are similar in appearance, but here the ventilation is somewhat more useful. A duct helps to channel fresh air down to the CPU fan, and there's additional ventilation over the expansion card slots. At the front of the case you can also see the two USB ports along with the headphone and microphone jacks.
 |
| Click to enlarge |
At the rear of the system are all of the standard connections. The expansion slot area is empty other than the graphics card, although you could fill at least one slot with a four port USB bracket and use the remaining two onboard USB headers. Unfortunately, such an adapter with the system we were sent, though PC Club does send the motherboard box along with all of the manuals and additional cabling. This can be useful, but there isn't anything that's really required within the box. We've already covered the various ports that are included, so we won't get into further details of that area. Let's take a look at the inside.
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koomo - Tuesday, August 29, 2006 - link
Hi Jared,Any expectations for when the next mid-range buyer's guide will be posted? (Last one was May 9th, just prior to AM2 and Core 2 Duo).
It sure would be nice to see one juat after you all have tested the soon-to-be released ATI lineup. I'll be very interested to see how power requirements compare between the mid-range NVIDIA and ATI cards, as well as comparative noise levels (will the new ATI blowers help that much?) Thanks!
Very nice review, BTW.
Turin39789 - Tuesday, August 29, 2006 - link
Get in in under $1000 and We'll talkKorruptioN - Tuesday, August 29, 2006 - link
It appears that the three right side holes are not utilized in screwing the motherboard down to the tray? They instead run the optical drive IDE cable underneath.Also, the choice of using an ALLIED PSU is a bad one -- consider it bottom-end generic.
QueBert - Tuesday, August 29, 2006 - link
I consider your statement to be generic. Allied does make a lot of entry level, very basic PSU's. But, they make some http://www.pcclub.com/product_details.cfm?itemno=A...">great ones.. Infact. the one I just linked to, replaced a Enermax that died in my system. Was very quiet, had plenty of power, and overall is a PSU I'd recommend to anyone looking. Allied makes a ton of different PSU's, some of they might very well be crap, I won't dispute. But the one I own, ran a system with 4 HD's, 2 Opticals, an X800, 2 120MM and 80MM fan and more then enough power left over. Powmax makes "bottom end PSU's" there's a HUGE difference between "bottom end" and "generic"A good # of the barebone cases PC-Club sell come with Allied, I build pc's for people for a living, and I've had very few problems, with even their lower end psu's *shrug*
Allied gets a bad rap, which I'm sure is for reasons that date back 5+ years? Based off that line of thinking, Maxtor makes the worst HD's ever...
yacoub - Tuesday, August 29, 2006 - link
Good review, Jarred. Nice to see how a pre-built system can perform in a review that covers all the basics and even overclocking.Harkonnen - Tuesday, August 29, 2006 - link
On the internals and construction page, third paragraph. PSU is typed as SPU."If you want to do more than that, you may find that you need to replace the default SPU with a beefier unit."
JarredWalton - Tuesday, August 29, 2006 - link
I dunno - I kinda like the way SPU rolls off the tongue. :Dchunkychun - Tuesday, August 29, 2006 - link
Is it really a great time to upgrade? It seems that directx 10 would require you to upgrade your graphics card realitively soon. Should people just wait?JarredWalton - Tuesday, August 29, 2006 - link
DX10 may be important for games, but there's always something coming in the near future. I'm not aware of any games that are going to require DX10/WGF2 any time soon. I mean, we're only now getting a reasonable number of games that require SM3.0 (just in time for DX10, right?) At the ultra-high-end, it's probably worth waiting, but for mid-range a 7900 GT or X1900 XT level card is going to last quite a while at moderate detail settings.We need Vista before we'll get DX10, and I'm not holding my breath for an early 2007 Vista launch. I'm betting on closer to March. That's over six months away, so really I think now *is* a good time to upgrade... provided you haven't already done so in the past year or two. If you have a 6800/X800 GPU or better, you can probably wait. If you have an Athlon XP/Pentium 4 (prior to Prescott) or earlier CPU, upgrading to Core 2 wouldn't be a bad move. Maybe wait another month for prices to stabilize, but that's about it.
bamacre - Tuesday, August 29, 2006 - link
Well said, JW.