some things in general…

SuperFlower is becoming more and more popular nowadays. The reason is simple: they make decent, good looking and competitively priced cases
One of our sponsors, Comtechnology, offered us SF's latest creation for review.

Let’s start by taking a look what’s in the box.





Package

The package contained following parts:

SuperFlower SF-561T2

Power cable

A little bag with screws and cable strips

A short manual/scheme describing the front I/O connectors

2 brackets for closing add-on card slots in the rear panel

Wondering what that special bracket is needed for? Keep on reading; I will reveal this secret soon. :)





Specifications

5.25" DRIVE BAYS: 5 / 3.5" DRIVE BAYS: 3 / 3.5" HIDDEN: 3

I/O Interface at front side: 2* USB Port, IEEE 1394, S/P, MIC

Dimension (D*W*H): 480*200*485 mm

Weight With Power Supply : 10.5Kg

And here you can find more detailed specifications on the SuperFlower site.

Looks good, let's see how my system fits in there.

Installation

The following systems will be built into the case, and used later on in this review for testing the PSU.

Piotkes rig !
CPU	Intel Pentium 4 2.6 GHz 800 fsb
Mainboard	Asus p4p800 deluxe
Cooling	Thermalright SLK947 + 80 mm enermax fan
Memory	2*256 Mb pc3200 OCZ rev. 2
Video	Albatron Geforce 4 MX480 64 DDR
Hard Disk	Seagate Barracuda 5 80 Gb

Removing the side panels is easy. No screw driver or any other tool needed, just remove the thumbnails, and hop, there go the panels.
It’s the same for the hard disk rack, so if you would like to install some fans, you can quickly remove the rack, to have more working space.

For the rest everything is about the same as in other cases…


The side-panel-thumbscrews:



Removing the hard disk rack:




I told you already that there's a "special" bracket included. Well, to connect the front I/O panel, most cases have a bunch of cables. Here it's the same, except for the firewire port. It has a normal external connector. Take a look on how we route the cables:


Does his clear things up ?




Well, the installation went smooth. Up to date systems can generate a lot of heat... how does the SuperFlower get rid of this heat? On to the next page...

Cooling

As computers generate more and more heat, cooling has become and important part. So a good case should provide enough cooling possibilities.
In this case you can place a maximum of 5 fans, without any modding off course.
In the front panel there’s room for 2x 80 mm fans. Installation of these is very simple as you only have to click them in. To avoid that your case will fill up with dust in no time, there’s a dust filter installed. Isn’t that easy?
These fans will also cool your hard drive(s) as they are situated right in front.


2*80 mm front fan holder + dust filter:




The hot air has to get out of your case. That’s logical. To do that SuperFlower included an 80 mm fan installed in the top panel. It does not support rpm monitoring, but can be connected to the power supply by a pass-through molex, so you won’t lose a connector. It us not attached by screws, but by some sort of longer pushpins, which are very easy to use.
But that’s not all; you can place 2 more 80 mm fans in the rear panel. Or one 120 mm fan.


Top 80 mm fan:




On the images you already spotted some plexi. What's that? Aha, carry on, to the next page.

Looks

The real reason you're buying this case for....

On a LAN you mostly see two different types of cases. Some very nicely modded cases, and the vanilla white cases. You also want a “different” case, so can mod your case. This takes a lot of time, and if you’re not really handy, then you’ll have the ugliest case at the LAN…

To help out these people case manufacturers started making pre-modded cases.

This case, the SF-561T2 is one of them.
The first thing modders do is change the colour of the front leds. Everyone has green leds, nothing special about it, so SuperFlower put a blue power led in this case. And, less special, an orange IDE activity led.
“And on the second day, he created light…” Or something like that :-). What I mean is, the SF-561T2 came with internal lighting, provided by the 80 mm fan that sits at the top. It’s not an ordinary case fan, this one is totally transparent, and has four coloured led’s (red, green, blue, orange).


Power button, reset button and the two led’s....



Top coloured fan:




So we have light, but what use has this if you can’t see into your case. Off course you can always remove your case panels, but that’s not really what we want. Case windows solve this problem. SuperFlower placed two of them. A big one the left case panel, covering almost the entire panel. A second one in top panel with the “lighted” 80mm fan fitted in the middle, and a good looking grill cut-out to allow the hot air to escape.

All this makes the SuperFlower far from bad looking, but there’s more…

The front panel is made out of steel, but as you maybe already have seen on other SuperFlower cases, there’s also an extra plexi front applied. If you don’t like it, it can be easily removed by spinning of some thumbscrews.

A silver coloured case with lots of plexi.


A view on the entire case...
And a closer look, on the finishing of such a window:




The concept is good, but it needs a finishing touch. SuperFlower also thought of this. The magic word is chrome!
The front thumbscrews, the power and reset button and the front I/O panel are made very shiny. You can see my reflection in the pictures.


Shiny I/O panel:




So far for the case, how does the included PSU perform? is it any good?

PSU

I once had a PSU from SuperFlower, a 320Watt dual fan. It was decent, and silent. How about this one…

A 400 watt PSU was provided with this case

Some specifications

Model No: P4 SF-400TE



But what a disappointment! This one is really loud. Looks like some extremely cheap fans used with this PSU, possible a relabelled no-name PSU!

The voltage rails after running 3DMark to stress my system were:



You can clearly see on the first graph were I start up 3DMark.

What can we notice? Well first of all, the unstable Vcore of my Asus p4p800 Deluxe.... Besides that, extremely stable +3.3 V and + 5 V rails. In idle position, the 12 V rails is higher then most PSU's I had until now, reaching no “out of bounds” values. This had its benefit, especially while stressing the computer. All the other PSU's I had, dropped to 11.7 on the 12 V line, while this one only drops to 11.9. This can improves stability, especially when you are overclocking your system.

So, I installed my computer, looked at the included cooling and stressed the PSU, time for a conclusion I would say.

Conclusion:

I like the case, great design, very easy in use, decent price..... What could I want more ? A removable motherboard tray. As you maybe know, I work most of the time without a case. Motherboard lying around somewhere on my desk... video card giving bad contact because it's unstable plugged in, ...
I know only few cases having this feature, but it would just make this case perfect !

In short:

Great looks
Stable 400 watt PSU
Quit Silent and funky 80 mm fan
Very Decent price (+- 80 € at the time of writing this review)

Loud PSU
No removable motherboard tray

I would like to thank Comtechnology for providing us with the test sample.




If you have any questions or comments on this review: Click here


/Piotke Out!