Review: Novatech Vulcan V2 ATX PC case

Today I will be reviewing the Novatech Vulcan V2 Midi ATX PC case which is the case I'm currently using for my main PC. First I'll give you some of the specifications and them we'll get on with the review.

Specifications:

Dimensions: 43.8cm (H) x 47cm (D) x 18.5cm (W)
Weight: 6.2kg
5.25" Drive Bays: 3
3.5" Drive Bays: 5
Expansion Slots: 7
Top mounted PSU

Cooling Options
Front: 1 x 120mm Blue LED fan (Installed).
Rear: 1 x 80mm fan (Installed) or 1 x 92mm fan (Optional).
Side: 1 x 120mm fan or 1 x 140mm fan (optional).

Front Panel Ports
USB3.0 x 1 (Has a internal USB 3.0 motherboard header connector)
USB2.0 x 2
1 x Headphone
1 x Mic

Motherboard Support
Standard ATX
Micro ATX
Mini ITX

Link to product: http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/cases/cases/nov-vulca2.html

Main review:

As you can see it's a fairly standard ATX case which you can get for £18.98 from Novatech.co.uk and as this is a own brand case you can't get it anywhere else. Considering it's only £19 you get a 80mm fan, A 120mm blue LED fan, The usual motherboard standoffs and motherboard screws, optical and HDD drive screws and the PCI screws and a small motherboard speaker. However you don't get any proper PCI slot covers, The ones it has once you take them off you can't put them back on again.

The build quality is good considering the price however the side panels do bend a bit diagonally so that makes it a little harder when trying to put them back on. Both side panels use two thumb screws each at the back to fasten on to the case however they will stay on fairly well without them.

The one thing I don't get about the left side panel is there is mounting holes for one fan at the top and the mesh continues further down but there isn't another set of fan mounting holes yet there is enough room for another 120mm or 140mm fan. I thought it would make more sense to put either two sets of fan mounting holes on the side panel or at least put one set at the bottom to help cool your graphics card.

The front panel is fairly sturdy and provides good airflow as most of it is mesh with a thin layer of spongy like material that acts as a decent filter that does catch quite a bit of dust. The 5.25" bay covers and the 3.5" bay cover is also made of the same mesh and spongy stuff.

Moving on to the front I/O panel the power switch has a blue LED and feels quite nice to press. The two USB 2.0 ports feel a little bit loose when plugging in USB devices however I haven't had any issues with them yet. I haven't used the mic port that much yet however the headphone port has gotten a little dodgy so when I wiggle it a bit the sound can go crackly and can cut out. Clearly not a great quality port.

Also on my case the top right bit of silver trim can come away from the front panel. One last thing about the front panel is that it's a bit of a pain to pull off and the 5.25" and 3.5" bay covers are also quite difficult to get off as well although it is a bit easier to get them off when you have the front panel off.

Moving to the inside it's mostly straight forward. When putting in the PSU I did notice it is quite difficult to get the PSU lined up with the back so you can get all the screws in. Something clearly isn't quite lined up properly somewhere. Also there isn't much space around the motherboard area and while this didn't affect me as I have a Micro ATX board it may get a bit cramped in there if you was to use a full size ATX motherboard.

One thing this case is missing is a hole in the motherboard tray for getting to CPU cooler backplates. One thing I would have liked to have seen is a 120mm fan mount on the back as 92mm fans are harder to get and with all these new AIO CPU water coolers having 120mm radiators and fans there really isn't an option for using them with this case.

Because this is a fairly thin case at 18.5cm you don't have much room for CPU coolers. I currently have a Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Rev 2 cooler and it is 12.6cm tall so you would only be able to fit a cooler up to about 14cm tall which pretty much rules out all the CPU coolers that use 120mm fans and above.

Cable management wise there really isn't any however for wires with small connectors (aka fan wires and front I/O panel wires.) you can fit through the small holes that are there however pretty much all the cables from your PSU will have to stay on the motherboard side which makes it quite difficult to make it look tidy.

Modding it:

The first obvious mod that you could do to this case is a window in the left side panel as adding fans to the side panel isn't going to help much in terms of cooling and having holes in your side panel isn't going to help with dust either and well it just looks cool.

As there is actually a fourth 5.25" bay behind the front panel I/O ports you could cut that out and add either a blank 5.25" bay cover and replace the ports with some better quality ones or just have it as another 5.25" bay.

It is possible to fit a 240mm rad in the front with a bit of modding although you would lose two 5.25" bays and all the 3.5" HDD bays. There is enough room to fit a 120mm rad where the front 120mm fan mount is however you would need to remove the 3.5" HDD bays as only one 120mm fan will fit with them there.

It is also possible to put a 240mm rad on the floor if you cut out a couple of holes for the fans and again  remove the 3.5" HDD bays although you will not be able to use the bottom 3 PCI/PCIe slots on your motherboard if you use a thin radiator and one set of fans on the top or bottom of the rad.

Something else you might want to do is cut out a hole in the motherboard tray so you can get to the back of the motherboard to install/remove the CPU cooler backplate if you have one. Might make replacing you CPU cooler a bit easier.

Conclusion:

Overall this is a fairly decent case considering the price however there are a few quality issues that could do with being sorted out. There is a few features it's lacking but nothing that important. While this is a great case for people on a small budget if you can go higher then go higher as you will get more features and a bit better quality as well.

Final score: 7/10

If you have any questions please leave a comment below and I will do my best to answer. Thanks for reading my first review and hopefully I will get another one out soon.

News: Going to be doing some reviews plus other stuff you can expect.

Hello all. Just a short bit for news for today, I am going to start to do a few reviews and post them on this blog. There won't be that many for a start as well I don't have that much to review. They will mostly be computer related although there might be a few other random things dotted about as well.

I will also try to post a few more Quick Tech Tips as the last one was posted pretty much a year ago so yeah... I will be writing the third part to the "My first PC build" series of posts as I've changed quite a few things on my main PC since the last post and finally I've started to work on CMDQuest again. For anyone that doesn't know CMDQuest is a command line RPG/open world game I'm making and I will be posting updates on how thats coming along too.

Right I think thats everything, Oh and one last thing I'm interested to know how many people actually read this so if you have come here before or even if this is your first time on my blog please leave a comment below. This would be much appreciated so thanks. :)

How To: Gather information about your pc using the Linux command line.

Today I will show you how to use the Linux command line to find out all sorts of stuff about your PC hardware and software. There is also a bash script at the bottom of this post that will run all of these commands and save the information into a folder in your home directory and then create a archive of all the files.

Most of these commands should already be installed on your system however lm-sensors and hddtemp you probably need to install. I'll tell you how to install them when we get to them.

Right then on to the list.

sudo dmidecode

The command dmidecode gives you a lot of information about your PCs hardware which is read from the PC's BIOS. While not 100% reliable it's a good way to find out the more obscure stuff about your PC hardware. More information on dmidecode can be found here: http://www.nongnu.org/dmidecode/

sudo lspci

The lspci command lists all the PCI buses and devices connected to your PC, This can include USB controllers, The IDE controller, The SATA controller, As well as all the PCI/PCIe cards you have installed.

sudo lsusb

Similar to the lspci command the lsusb command lists all USB devices connected to the computer.

uname -a

This command displays the name of the PC, the kernel version, the date and time and architecture of your PC.

sudo lsmod

The command lsmod displays all the kernel modules that are currently loaded on your computer.

sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda

This command displays information about your hard drive like size, partitions and the file systems on the partitions as well as a few other details. Note that you may need to change the sda part depending on what type of hard drives you have as well as how many hard drives you have. Use the next command to find out the names of your hard drives.

df -hT

Similar the previous command this one lists all the filesystems mounted on the computer. This command is a good way to find out what your hard drives are called on Linux.

ifconfig -a

This command displays information about all the network interfaces active on your PC. Handy if you are setting up a network connection.

uptime

The command uptime displays the current time, how long the computer has been running, how many users are logged on and the load average for the past 1, 5 and 15 minutes.

echo $PATH

This command displays the contents of your $PATH variable. This is basically a list that the system uses to find executables when you call a command (like echo for example) so you don't have to go to the directory where the executables are before executing them.

To install the last two commands simply type this into a terminal:

sudo apt-get install lm-sensors hddtemp

And type in your password when prompted. Now you can use the "sensors" command and the "hddtemp" command. before you can use the "sensors" command you need to run:

sudo sensors-detect

This command scans your computer for any sensors it can find. It will ask you whether you want to scan for different types of sensors. Say yes to all these questions. When it's done it will show a list of drivers that are needed for the sensors that it finds. It will ask if you want to add these drivers to your "/etc/modules" file. Say yes here. Now you can run the sensors command:

sudo sensors

The sensors command displays the temperatures of all the temperature sensors as well as the RPM speed of any fan speed sensors.

sudo hddtemp /dev/sda

As the name might suggest this command displays the temperature of all the hard drives connected to your computer. As with the fdisk -l command you may need to change the sda part depending on what type of hard drives you have as well as how many hard drives you have. Use the df -hT command to find the names of your hard drives.

Finally here is that bash script that will run all of these commands and put the output of each of the commands into a file and put all of those files into a directory called PCinfo in your home folder. It will also create a .tar archive in the directory that the script is with all the files in.

I've also added a few commands that copy the syslog, apport.log and kern.log files as well as the fstab file into the PCinfo folder as well as these can also be useful for finding information about the Linux system.

Again where hard drive names are just simply replace them with your own. I may improve this at some point so if I do I'll try and remember to edit this post to update it as well as post it separately.

To use this bash script simply copy the following code and paste it into a empty text file and save it. Then you just need to allow it to be executed, To do this go to the directory the script file is in in a terminal and type this in:

chmod 755 PCinfo

Hit enter and it should now be able to be executed. What follows is the bash script:

#!/bin/bash

mkdir ~/PCinfo

sudo dmidecode > ~/PCinfo/dmidecode

sudo lspci > ~/PCinfo/pci_devices

sudo lsusb > ~/PCinfo/usb_devices

cp /var/log/syslog ~/PCinfo/

cp /var/log/apport.log ~/PCinfo/

cp /var/log/kern.log ~/PCinfo/

sensors > ~/PCinfo/sensors

uname -a > ~/PCinfo/uname

sudo lsmod > ~/PCinfo/lsmod

sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda > ~/PCinfo/disks

sudo hddtemp /dev/sda > ~/PCinfo/hddtemp

cp /etc/fstab ~/PCinfo/

df -hT > ~/PCinfo/disk_info

ifconfig -a > ~/PCinfo/network_info

uptime > ~/PCinfo/uptime

echo $PATH > ~/PCinfo/PATH

tar -cvf PCinfo.tar ~/PCinfo

My Personal PC build, Part 2.

Hello again. This is the second part of the detailed list of components that make up my first PC build. Right now where did i get to... ah yes next up is the motherboard which is a M-ATX MSI G41M-P28 socket LGA775 motherboard. Some specs:


Intel G41 chipset
Integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (Intel® GMA X4500)
Supports two unbuffered DIMM of 1.5 Volt DDR3 800/1066/1333* (OC) DRAM, 8GB Max
One PCI Express x16 slot (PCI Express Bus SPEC V1.0 compliant).
Two 32-bit v2.3 master PCI bus slots.
Four 3Gb/s SATA ports
One Ultra DMA 66/100 IDE controller
Audio chipset integrated by VIA® VT1708S

Next up is the processor, This used to be in my IBM M52:

Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor 630 HT
3.00GHz clcock speed.
2MB L2 cache
64-bit

Yeah i know it's a fairly old CPU but hey when you can't afford anything better you have to use what you got right? This is one of the areas i plan on upgrading. The CPU cooler i'm using is a Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Rev 2 which is fairly cheap but well built and it does the job.

Next up is the RAM. I have one stick of Crucial 4GB 240 pin DDR3 PC3-10600 RAM. I can go up to 8GB which is the plan. Last up is the graphics card which is a Asus GeForce GT 610, Yeah not that great but for most of the games i play it works very well and it works with Linux which is always good as I am now Using Linux and my main OS. A few specs:

1GB DDR3 RAM
PCI Express 2.0
Low Profile
HDMI, DVI-I, VGA
DirectX 11.0
OpenGL 4.2

And I think thats it. Overall not a bad PC if I do say so myself. There are some things that could do with upgrading but it's still pretty quick compared to my last PC anyway. Anyway Cya next time.

My Personal PC build, Part 1.

Hey all. First post of 2013! hopefully i will post more on this blog this year. Well it's finally happened, I've finally built my first PC. Been wanting to do this since before I got my IBM M52 but couldn't quite afford it then. First I'll give you a detailed list of all the components. So first here it is in all it's glory, Awesome isn't it?

The case is a Novatech Vulcan V2 ATX midi tower case. It has:

Three usable 5.25 inch bay (It does have four but the top one is unusable because thats where the front panel ports/switchs are.)
5 3.5 inch bays
Seven expansion slots
A 80mm/92mm fan mounting point at the rear
A 120mm fan mount at the front
Two 120mm/140mm fan mounting points on the side panel
Two USB 2.0 ports
One USB 3.0 port (Connects using a motherboard header connector)
Headphone/mic ports
Top mounted PSU

It also came with two fans, one 120mm blue LED fan and one 80mm red fan. I'm still using the 120mm fan but the 80mm fan is else where.

The power supply is a Novatech PowerStation Gaming 400W Silent ATX2 Modular Power Supply. It's specs look like:

AC Input 200-260V ~ 3A 50/60Hz
DC Output +3.3V  +5V  +12V1  +12V2  -12V  +5Vsb
Max Load 24A    20A   18A      18A       0.3A   2.5A
Max Combined Wattage    120W        300W     3.6W  12.5W
Total Power 400W

Next up is all the fans:

Arctic F High Performance Case Fan - 80mm
Arctic F High Performance Case Fan - 120mm
Coolermaster SickleFlow Blue Case Fan - 120mm
Novatech 120mm blue LED Case Fan - Came with the case.

The optical drive is a LiteOn SATA CD/DVD writer and the hard drive is a Hitachi Deskstar 7K80 series 80GB SATA 3.5 inch HDD.

I'm going to stop here as if i put all of it in this post it will end up to long. I'll leave you with a picture of my desk now, See you all next time.

Quick update on my IBM M52

Hello all. Some of you may have seen my post on Twitter that i have removed the connectors from two 4 pin 60mm PWM case fans for a plan i had. Well now i shall tell you what said plan was. Lets start from the beginning. I replaced the two 4 pin 60mm PWM case fans in my IBM M52 with two 3 pin 60mm case fans however they wouldn't plug into the 4 pin headers on the motherboard so i had to use a couple of 3 pin fan connector to 4 pin molex connector adapters that came with the 3 pin 60mm fans.

Yesterday i had this idea where if i took the connectors off the 4 pin fans and put them on the 3 pin fans then i would be able to plug them into the motherboard headers. This would free up the adapters for other things (More on that soon.) and i would be able to read the RPM of the fans. So i set about finding out how to remove the connectors of a case fan.

I found a great guide on how to do this on YouTube here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUUxt6GBV6A

I don't have one of those tools used in the video so i just used the end of a small metal file. I removed the connectors of the 4 pin fans first then i removed the connectors of the 3 pin fans and put the 4 pin connectors  on the 3 pin fans. Plugged them into the motherboard headers and all is still working. Fairly easy to do really.

And thats the end of this post. Cya next time.

Project Dell Dimension XPS H266 part 3.

Hello all. This is part 3 of my story of getting a Dell Dimension XPS H266 up and running again. I've actually taken the two 60mm fans out as i needed to put them in my main computer and i don't really think they where doing that much good seeing as the case has fairly small holes in the front. Unfortunately this older hardware doesn't have readable temperature sensors so i don't know what sort of temp it's running at. It doesn't seem to get that hot anyway.

Next thing i decided to do was put the original CD-ROM drive that came with it back in along side the CD/DVD drive i'd put in there before so it could have two optical drives. This tower PC has two 5.25-inch bays so this was fairly simple. now it have the two optical drives on the secondary IDE channel and the hard drive and zip drive on the primary IDE channel.

This PC also has three 3.5-inch bays that holds the floppy drive and the zip drive leaving one empty. Now i had a spare floppy drive from another PC that didn't work (A Dell Dimension 486/33) so i thought to my self perhaps i could add another floppy drive to the XPS H266. so i took the drive bay cage out and took the front cover of the empty 3.5-inch bay only to discover there was a metal plate behind it. It was connected at three points so i just bent it backwards and forwards and it came off. I then slid the floppy drive into the empty 3.5-inch bay, put the screws in and put the drive bay cage back into the PC.

At this point i realised the power supply only had one floppy drive power connector so a quick search on Google later and decided i needed a 4 pin molex to 4 pin floppy power connector. Managed to find a cheap one on eBay. got it a few days ago, hooked it up and now i have no spare molex connectors in this PC.

 The floppy cable i'm using is from the same computer as the second floppy drive however i did run into a bit of a problem when it came to hooking the cable up to the two floppy drives. On the two floppy connectors on the cable there was a small bit of plastic on one side probably to stop you from putting the cable in the wrong way round. However with these particular floppy drives and this cable i needed to put the connector in the opposite way round. on the older drive it wasn't a problem but on the drive that came with this PC it was a bit trickier. You see it had a plastic shroud around the connector pins so the cable connector wouldn't go in. After a few minutes i decided to get rid of the little bit of plastic on the cable connector. Out came a metal file and a few minutes later i had the little plastic bit low enough to fit.

With all the cables hooked up i fired it up and made sure everything worked. All drives recognised in BIOS and in Windows 95. Haven't check Debian yet but all the drives should work with it.

And that's the end of this part. Cya next time.

Oh and i'll probably post some updated pictures at some point. May be a while though...

Project Dell Dimension XPS H266 part 2.

Hello all. This is part 2 of my story of getting a Dell Dimension XPS H266 up and running again. With this computer i also got another old computer, A Dell Dimension 486/33 desktop PC which also didn't work when i got it and still doesn't. I think it has some sort of BIOS problem but that another story. I stripped it of most of the non-important hardware and that left me with a ISA sound card, an ISA scanner controller card, another CD-ROM drive and a IDE cable.

Now seeing as the XPS H266 only had a onboard sound card intergrated on the motherboard i thought seeing as it has three ISA slots why not see if it works in there. So i took the side panel off the XPS, stuck the ISA sound card in a free ISA slot, put the side panel back on and proceeded to install the software drivers. As this is a old sound card that only has DOS/Win 3.1 drivers i had to install it through DOS on Win95 and once i got it all installed it worked.

Next thing i did was replace the CD-ROM drive with a CD/DVD-ROM drive that was actually in my current computer seeing as it is a ATA drive. That went well too. I decided that it would be interesting to try and install Linux on this PC as Linux runs very well on old hardware and it would be a up to date operating system so if i could figure out how to connect it to the internet i could. It took me a while to decide which distro to install but i decided on Debian in the end as it has really good hardware detection and fairly good minimum requirements too. Getting it install however wasn't easy. Because this computer didn't have any form of Ethernet (only dial-up) it was going to be interesting. After trying to install from both the first installation disc and the netinst disc which didn't work i ended up booting from PLOP boot manager on a floppy and then booting to the first installation disc on a USB stick which was installed to the USB stick using UNetbootin.

After getting Debian installed i set about trying to connect to the internet and the only way i could think of was by using a spare USB wireless dongle i have. After a while i got that working and i could connect to my wireless router and update it. I've also made it so i can SSH into it as i only have one monitor and having to switch the VGA cable around is a bit of a pain.

And thats caught you all up to where i am now. If you want to know if i do anything else with this computer then follow me on twitter as i post on there when i do these things(If i remember that is). Now on to the specs of this beast:

Dell Dimension XPS H266

CPU: Intel Pentium II with MMX running at 266MHz with a 32KB internal cache

Motherboard: Intel 440FX PCIset

Memory: 4 SIMM sockets, 2 used, 2 available. 2 32MB EDO RAM modules installed.

Expansion slots: 7, 3 PCI slots, 4 ISA slots.

Graphics card: Matrox Millennium MGA-MIL/4 PCI 4MB

sound cards: Yamaha OPL3-SA2 and SC400 Rev. 4G Sound FX Gold-16

TV card: Win/TV-PCI PAL-BG/I 60134 rev C2V

Modem: Sportster Voice 28.8 Faxmodem

Hard drive: Western Digital 8.4GB ATA

Optical drive: TSST TS492C CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive

Zip drive: Iomega zip 100 internal ATA drive

Floppy drive: NEC floppy disk drive

Fans: 1 rear 9.2cm, 2 front 6cm.

PSU: 200W

OSs: Windows 95 OSR 2.1 and Debian squeeze 6.0

And finally a few pictures of this computer:

Project Dell Dimension XPS H266 has started!

Hello all. A few weeks ago i got a old Dell Dimension XPS H266 tower PC that had the RAM go bad in it and it had no hard drive and i thought to myself this would make a great PC for old PC games that only run on DOS/Win95 so i set about first finding some RAM for it which was easier said than done and then set about finding a hard drive, not that easy either.

As this is a fairly old computer it uses 72 pin SIMM EDO modules either 16MB or 32MB in size and can take up to a maximum of 128MB of RAM. Doesn't sound like much does it? It's surprising how quick it actually is. More on that later though. So i searched the internet for days trying to find the right type of RAM and finally i found some. As usual eBay came to the rescue. I found a couple of sticks each 32MB in size. That would give me 64MB of RAM to play with. not bad.

So i got them, took the old out and put in the new and they worked! One down one to go. Next up was the hard drive and it was a bit easier to find the right one. Again as this PC is fairly old it uses the ATA IDE interface for hard drives and optical drives. eBay came good again and i found a 8.4GB Western Digital  hard drive that looked like it should work so i got that, whacked it in, turned the computer on and it was being recognised by the BIOS. Two out of two and everything was going well.

With this computer i also got Windows 95 OSR 2.1 (I think) so as Win95 can run both DOS and Windows programs i set about installing win95 on this computer. Installing Win95 was a fairly painless process and soon i was booted into Win95. I then started to update it. First i installed the latest version of DirectX that is compatible with Win95 which is DirectX 8, Then i installed the latest version of Internet Explorer that is compatible with Win95 which is IE6, I got the two USB ports working and installed the drivers for all the hardware. So i now have relatively up to date installation of Win95.

And thats the end of this blog post, Next time the story continues as i install more hardware and see what this thing is really capable of. I'll also post detailed information about the hardware and a few pictures of it.

Se you next time.

My current PC, A IBM M52 part 2

Hello again. today i'm going to talk about the insides of this computer. First a picture of it with just the top cover open:

It with the cover open, in this picture you can see the PSU, DVD drive, PCI fan and a bit of the motherboard.

to get access to the CPU, RAM, hard drive, floppy drive and front fans you need to tilt the whole front section up like this:

The front drive bay tilted all the way up.

In the drive bay we have the CD/DVD drive on top of the hard drive and next to them is the floppy drive.

The PSU is in the top left corner in the above picture with the motherboard being across the bottom. Starting from the left we have the PCI riser card with one PCI port and one ADD 2-R port that can also work as a PCI-E 1x port.

As you can see i have a PCI slot fan in the top PCI slot which is held up by a piece of metal from a video tape. This case doesn't come with any screws to hold PCI cards/fans in place so hence i used that.

Then we have the two RAM slots to the right of the PCI riser card slot. It can take a maximum of 2GB of RAM in each slot making a total of 4GB. I currently have 3GB of RAM in it which makes it a fairly quick machine.

Above the RAM we have two heatsinks, one smaller one on the left and a bigger one on the right. The smaler one on the left is over the north bridge chipset and the bigger one is for the Pentium 4 CPU. We then have the two case/CPU fans on the drive bay to the right of the CPU heatsink. These are right in front of the front grill. A bit of info about these fans:

Make: SUPERRED
Model: CHD6012ES-AH(E)
Power info: DC12V 0.30A
Connector type: 4 pin
Dimensions: 6cm - width, 2cm - depth

A close up of the two fans:

The two case/CPU fans.

I plan on replacing these two front fans with more efficient/quieter ones soon. See if i can get it to run a bit cooler and quieter. I'll finally leave you with another couple of pictures of inside it:

If you have any questions or comments about anything on my blog feel free to email me.