Supermicro SuperChassis Black 1U Rackmount Server Case 200W CSE-512L-200B

Well made and solid chassis, Supermicro have a great quality!

This is an excellent quality chassis. I purchased it to build a home server with RAID 1 hard disks. It just mounts 2 hard disks and a micro-ATX mainboard. The quality is great, it is heavy, it comes with a good manual, and everything fits perfectly. BUT. There is one drawback. It is noisy like your vacuum cleaner. Both the power supply fan as well as the internal fan create a small airflow hurricane to cool the most powerful processor. Which is fine if you install a high powered Xeon mainboard or so. I installed a fanless Atom board. And the server was to be installed in my home office. So after runnig it for 5 minutes I decided this was not It. First I rewired the power supply fan to 5V. This is not something any user can do, but I am an electronic engineer. You have to open the power supply, cut and resolder wires. It will void your warranty and perhaps take your life if you are not qualified. But it helps. Next I put the big turbo fan on a 5V supply, leaving the PWM wires in place. That made the ventilation almost silent. But the fan produced a soft, growling hum which was audible. And annoying. Then I ordered 2 40mm ultra silent 12VDC fans here on Amazon. Removed the turbo fan, drilled holes in the removable fan mounting plate. They fitted very nicely in the 80mm space where previously the Turbo fan was. My fans were a little bit too silent (14 dB) and provided a little bit too low airflow to my liking. Had I to do it again, I would install fans which a are a trifle more powerful. Really, you won't hear 22 dB or 24 dB in an airconditioned room. My server works reliably, even under stress, but a bit more airflow would feel more secure. Now maybe someone says I can't blame Supermicro for installing noisy fans in a server chassis, right? Well, I can. Supermicro also sells low-power Atom fanless mainboards, which exactly match this case. When the intention is to match this case witch an Atom board, Supermicro should have matched the airflow and the fans with the Atom board. Then it would have been not a only good chassis, but an excellent chassis.

I bought this case to build a hackintosh in. My band uses this computer to run ableton and control our monitors at shows. The rack that the computer is in is small so we needed a 1u chassis. This was the only case that I found that supports full ATX and is 1u. It also comes with a great power supply so that is a plus. This thing is really well built and has a very pro look to it. One reviewer said it wouldn't work without the I/O plate, but it does. If you are using anything but a SM board, the plate will have to come out. I'm using a Gigabyte z77 atx board and it's tight around the audio jacks, but it fits. Also, you will need a low profile cpu cooler if you are not doing the SM board. One thing I noticed was it didn't come with a fan shroud like the description stated. Not a big deal to me because it wouldn't fit with the ram orientation of my motherboard. It is staying plenty cool without it. Also, the power supply has a 20 pin ATX connector. It will still work in a 24 pin jack, there will just be less bus amperage available. The cpu power has 8 pins which is now the standard. You WILL have to buy a front panel adapter to plug into any standard motherboard. SM uses a 16 pin connector that is only compatible with their stuff. All in all, I am quite pleased with this case especially considering the price. With the whole computer put together, it feels sturdy and runs cool. It is not silent, but it's not very loud either. It can be loud if the blower is going full blast, but I've never heard it go up except for during startup. My build: Gigabyte GA-Z77-DS3H Intel i5-3570k Kingston Hyperx Red 16gb Sandisk 128gb SSD Supermicro CSE-512L-200B Chasis Dynatron T459 Cooler

Awesome! It came with the I/O shield for my X10SLM-F board! I wasn't expecting that! The fan is a little strange because it actually sits on pegs and isn't bolted down to anything. It is constrained by the lip on the sheetmetal of the front surface and it sits on some soft material. I personally don't see a huge problem with it and it is running slow, cooling my SNK-P0046 passive heatsink atop the i3-4130. I am running pfSense on this box. It is not ultra quiet, but it is quiet enough in my opinion. The power supply fan has a slight tone to it besides the whooshing of air. It's not too loud though. Overall, with the box closed and running an ~40% CPU utilization by doing an "openssl speed" cipher benchmark, it did not get much louder than idle and I would compare the noise to that of a refrigerator or a small clip-on fan. I plan to move this to the basement but for the time being it is sitting behind me and the noise is easily ignored.

It work, but the power source connectors do not match the the Supermicro Motherboard I have even though it is the recommenced case. The connector is 20 and the motherboard has 24. This is usually a bad idea. Especially on Servers where everything is very precise. I bought this because this was the recommended case as I had bought the same series case but it was not the recommended one for my motherboard. They were almost Identical except for the front fans. So I was surprised to find the same power source. Also still waiting for Supermicro to respond riser Card Question posted a month ago.