Gadgetory

welcome to an unboxing that I'm actually quite excited about this is the antic 25 no no just an intact they're just celebrating their quarter century of quality and innovation which i think is very fair to say with a little 25 after their logo but this is the solo 2 which sounds like an upgraded solo but what it actually is is the quietest case they've ever produced it also has a lot of features that we have yet to see for manTech and some features that have become an tech staples so we've got internal USB 3 headers on this guy which is a first for an tech and then we've also got some previous innovations where they're basically taking everything they know about silent computing cases and they are putting it in here so the stickers really in my way but let's say a few things first ok so there's a dual layer design so it's a 1 millimeter steel splash polycarbonate top inside that panel design what that does is an isolate 8 and Evans noise so we saw multi-layer panels introduced on the P 180 so this is an older innovation we also have dual hard drive mounting options so you can either use grommets or even a suspension to March mount your hard drives we've seen this in the past so that is not really a new thing either here we have an anodized aluminum front panel which is something that is relatively new for an Tek because they don't really do the aluminum front panels but it's a my okay based on the pictures I've seen so far we're gonna get the case up in a minute looks like it's gonna look awesome we've also got a matte black interior which they've started doing on their higher-end cases finally high-end IO so two front panel USB three parts with internal motherboard connector for unparalleled data transmission that might be a little bit of an overstatement unparalleled data transmission I mean there are things that are faster than USB 3 but I see where they are coming from and it's certainly better than having those USB 3 connectors that are more of a of a pass-through rather than using a proper internal header which most of the new motherboards you're p67 sixty-eight motherboards are gonna support just fine terms of packing material we've got about an inch of foam on all sides of the case looks good and let's pull up the case itself now based on some of the reviews that I've seen in this guy supposedly it is even better than the Sonata series the quietness case ever produced by an tech so that is a very serious claim and let's have a look at how they have achieved that so first of all they've achieved it by confusing me about which direction it opens from there we go this baby open that looks nice that is actually a very very nice front panel finish so hold on let's start with the parts that are less interesting like the manual and that's pretty much it okay so we have a piano black powder coat finish on the top so you can see on the top we actually have an exhaust vent here like we see white like we saw in the original p180 no shroud on it just a regular exhaust vent the sides are also piano black a glossy finish here we are you can see that there the whole case is using very soft I did want that therefore now I can move closer if it helps oh very very soft rubber grommet so that should actually dead in any vibration being passed from the case to the table or the desk then it is positioned on its gonna run through the specs really quick with you here guys so elegant appearance yeah we can see that dual harddrive mounting system using trained mount with pre-installed silicon grommets or suspension mounts tomb external five-and-a-quarter this is something I really like to see fewer five and a quarter inch because most people are not installing a ton of five and a quarter inch devices something like you know your drive and then maybe a fan controller is about all you really need so instead they've taken more of that internal space that's available to them and they've allocated it instead of to stuff that people are less likely to use here is the internal design so there's your ear plastic layer as well as your metal layer that plastic layer is going to help to sound okay so instead they've allocated it to longer video cards so you can install a huge video card in this case with no complications and then more options for mounting your three and a half inch drives very very good idea right there next we have got the removable power supply support beam so I'll have a look at that in a minute front accessible flip down drive cages it's a front accessible flip down drive cage guess we'll find out give me a sec I'm gonna have to figure out how to open this there we go I figured out how to open it so there's just a few little uh few little tabs here so you just bend those back you open up the whole thing and there is the flip down front accessible hard drive bays now you can also see you can install a 120mm fan here and then for additional internal cooling and this is really neat because this looks like a case that doesn't have much ventilation on the surface but for additional cooling you can throw another fan here in the front which is going to directly blow cool air onto your graphics card and when you look at this from the side you can see there's actually significant ventilation space not only on the right hand side but also on the left hand side of the front panel so those fans are not going to be starved for air but by blocking the entire front of the case you're going to reduce the amount of noise that gets transmitted directly to someone sitting in front of it so let's have a look a closer look at the front so we I don't know how to get you guys a good angle on this but this is a really neat finish so you it's not like very coarse brushed lines it's very very very fine fine brush lines on the anodized aluminum which actually has a very cool a very sort of matte look until you get really really close and then you can see the brush is kind of a neat effect we have a hard drive led here power reset front audio ports USB 3 and front USB 2 there's your stamp tantek logo and that pretty much does it for the front of the case oh look at that more ventilation down there so because you're held up by these feet you're going to be able to get a little bit more fresh air to that bottom fan which as I mentioned before there is going to be blowing directly over your graphics card so have a look at the internal layout take all of our included screws some zip ties some good stuff like that for building your PC back here we've also got out here okay so you can either install three drives using the trays or you can use the suspension mounting system which is included with the accessories here to install two drives given that most people are not at this time installing more than a couple of drives I mean especially if you're building a new system you can buy you know three terabyte hard drives these days what's the incentive to install you know eight drives in your system so here we go oh no there's the suspension you know what let's go ahead I'm gonna reopen this from the front here and I'll show you guys the suspension system so I didn't screw this all the way back in unfortunately so that'll save us some time so yeah if you're not installing a ton of drives you just pull these guys out there's the grommets so that's the one way of mounting these are compatible two and a half inch drives as well you can see the spacing there for your two and a half inch SSDs or even hard drives and then here is the suspension system so you run your drives through these and what that does is it completely isolates any vibrations from the drive away from your case I mean don't transport your system around like that that's more for stationary systems in your office you know don't expect to ship it across the country using the suspension but it's there as an option in case you want it in terms of the rest of the internal layout we've got our front panel connectors here including an internal USB three header right there so that's going to plug directly into your motherboard instead of routing around the back to the i/o shield as well as your front USB to your front audio and then your front panel switches for your power you reset all of that good stuff we have an enormous cutout for CPU heatsink mounting options so if you have a backplate there is no way with this case you are going to have to remove your motherboard in order to install a CPU cooler with a backplate you just take off your other side panel and you screw the backplate in from the back and no worries about that okay you know here give me a sec I'll be back with the videocard so here's a Radeon 69 94 scale to show you guys how much extra space there is in this case four ginormous video cards so no worries as far as that's concerned as long as you've got some external exhaust going you can draw fresh air in from the front and you are good to go we've also got an included a detect ride pool fan you can see the little trike pull switch is built into the back here so we've got oh no that's that cool cool so it's got a high and a low setting on the back of the case and it's also got built-in silicone grommets so check this out so you're actually mounting it using grommets and then it also has Isolators see the orange Isolators here on either side to keep it away from the case whether you have an exhausting air or whether you turn it around and use a water cool like beyond water cooler like the enttec 620 or 920 you turn that around draw in fresh air for to cool your CPU and it's going to still be isolated from the case all right we have a power supply support bar here which you can remove just by taking out a couple screws if you do not need it and that's pretty much oh this is smart I didn't even notice what this was for so what this is for is so you can take a power supply with a 120mm fan and you can mount it either way and that 120mm fan is going to take in fresh air so this is kind of like a bottom mounted power supply but it's in the top that's very very cool so what it means is your power supply takes fresh air here blows it out the back and doesn't interfere with the cooling of your system at all very neat feature seven PCI expansion slots though that standard and then you've got your two lifts part optical drive mounting rails here and I think that pretty much covers everything I wanted to say about the solo - from an tech don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for unboxings reviews and other computer videos