Coolermaster Media 280 review - Whacky stuff
Author: Vedran Dakic
Date: 29 Jun 2007

Second idea I got is - why don't I make it a part of sound recording studio and see how this thing goes. I took a couple of FireWire controllers, connected everything, installed one additional 12cm fan and went for it. Installing this fan was actually pretty interesting, since this tends to be a problem with a lot of cases. The problem is usually the fact that you just don't have the right "tools" to install the fan inside a case - mostly it's because you need some special screws that aren't usually included in the "case package". In this case, I noticed that I have some additional plastic "screws" included with the case and that made my job very easy. Things can get pretty hot in the hard drive area when you record twenty audio tracks in realtime, no matter what kind of hard drives you have inside a case. Especially when the outside temperature is in the higher 30's. Needless to say, it's still in the studio, being in a perfect spot, "wasting" a very decent amount of space and just sort of "fits" there. BTW, HDD module has anti-shock rubber on both sides so it's a bit more "adjusted" for "normal" users.

In "tower" mode, everything is pretty much the same. You can re-assemble this case from desktop to tower mode in about five minutes. As far as the space is concerned, no biggie there - the design of the case doesn't change just because you changed the case orientation.

So, the fourth case study I thought of is - hmm, could I have a Tyan motherboard/dual Opteron rig in the case? It was kind of annoying to see that this case did everything else with flying colors so I really tried extra-hard to find a scenario where it wouldn't do the job. So, I ran into some troubles while trying to do this and that little red devil with a sharp fork in me was pretty happy now and dancing all around saying - ok, I managed to find something it can't do. Unfortunately for the little_red_guy, I came to a conclusion that these problems are easily manageable. The only thing I had to do was to remove the HDD bay completely and install HDD's in the 5.25" bays that were ment for optical devices. Well, I took three HDD removable bays, stuck three hard drives inside and in five minutes my dual Optie rig was inside. One additional thing I did out of pure percaution was removing one Zalman CNPS9700NT cooler from one of the CPU's (CPU #2) so I can have some additional space on top of the cooler. This cooler was replaced with a stock cooler whose profile is more "acceptable" for what I wanted to achieve - having some space around these coolers so 12cm coolers can do the job. This setup is actually quite promising, as well, since you can have a pair of 12cm coolers on the front and back, and one additional cooler on top, and that's one pretty good solution. I'm seriously considering ditching all future super-duper-hyper-expensive Supermicro cases I constantly use for server assembly in favour of this pretty reasonably-priced case. Who cares about a couple of screws here and there - I can have RAID inside, dual-CPU rig, and everything looks pretty good. And yes, I'm a firm hater of 1U servers and server cases. 1U means 747-liftoff-type-noise...