Installation

The first thing I noticed about the interior of this case is that it has more room for innards than an obese man’s stomach has for food (literally). The space inside of this case is more than enough to support all of today’s ATX 2.0+ boards, including the Tyan Trinity 400 test board I used. The board conforms to ATX 2.01 specs in which it says a case needs 6 places to screw in a board. The Yuri has those 6 stand offs and it also has a couple more stand off’s included with the extra screws so your board can be more secure than Jane in Tarzan’s arms. The design of the board is great because of the fact that nothing sits above the motherboard, there’s plenty of room to leave your entire board open for tweaking.

The Yuri didn’t come with a power supply, probably to reduce shipping charges, but normally if ordered through them, it comes either a KME 250W (http://www.colorcase.com/products/powersupply/kme250.html), or a Fortron 300W (http://www.colorcase.com/products/powersupply/fsp300.html) which is on AMD’s list of approved power supplies for Athlon processors. To supplement the hole left by missing power supply, I ran on over to CompUSA and picked up a 300W CompUSA brand PS and slapped it into the top of the case. There are no obstructions located inside the case to block the power supply cord to the motherboard’s ATX PS connector.

I mentioned above that the Yuri has pretty good ventilation but how loud is the case when everything is running? The Yuri stays at a whisper 60dB, it could be louder if not for the loud fan on the Alpha heatsink, nevertheless, this just blew me away, the Yuri is the quietest case that SystemLogic has ever reviewed. But lets explain why it is so quiet. Keep in mind that this case has more plastic than it does aluminum, the entire outer level of the case is plated with plastic, giving it a better overall quantity in which to muffle the sounds coming from the components inside.

Testing

The two primary things to test for in cases is the temperature and the noise level and as the noise level was already tested, lets see how hot we can get this case. All testing was done with standard computer configuration of motherboard, processor, ram, video, CD-ROM, and floppy devices.

Testbed:

Tyan Trinity 400 S1854 motherboard

500MHz Celeron (provided by Memory Man) with 3DfxCOOL Alpha cooler

128mb SDRAM (provided by Memory Man)

36X Generic CD-ROM drive

13.6GB Maxtor 7200 RPM Hard drive

3dfx Voodoo3 3000 PCI

Generic Floppy

To test the heat retaining capability of the case, only a case temperature test will be performed, additional test will be performed and results posted as soon as people tell us that they want to see more tests on cases. Email your requests to dave@systemlogic.net.

Case temperature is probably the most important test because a case is supposed to help keep components cool and the heat that all the components generate will come together to heat the case up and that’s what we will measure over a 30 minute period in increments of 5 min. The case is operating on one 80mm intake fan and one 80mm PS fan.

0 min. - 86 degrees F

5 min. - 90 degrees F

10 min. - 94 degrees F

15 min. - 96 degrees F

20 min. - 99 degrees F

25 min - 99 degrees F

30 min. - 99 degrees F

As you can see by the results, the case heated to a comfortable 96 degrees at it’s highest but it will not get much above that. Considering the hot components and the lack of a secondary fan, this case did pretty well in our tests, refusing to break the 100-degree barrier. The airflow inside of the case can be thanked for the great ventilation of air. If a couple of more fans are added, I can guarantee that this case would be a pleasant environment for all of your prized high tech devices.

>> Pros & Cons/Conclusion