Product ReviewsAPEX MI-100 Black / Mirror finish Computer Case
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32%
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15%
3%
11%
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 Rating: Review Date: 09/12/13 |
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Rating: Review Date: 09/09/13 |
Comment:
Small however spacious for a tiny case. There is space for a lot of hard drives if you Jimmy rig it with minimum effort. Good shinny finish. Power supply is quite quiet. Space for a 120mm fan exactly where the side 3.five tough drive must go. DVD player slides suitable in with no work and no guessing. Mine has a couple of defect and a single component gave out. That's why I took off an egg . The led lights on the front won't perform, nothing, nada. I've attempted anything I can think, checked and double checked the connectors, I removed the front panel, turn off the light in the space to no avail. The LED's just won't turn on for me. Second, my PSU was not sitting straight. It was leaning downward and interfered with the CPU Heatsink (HiperFlow Cooler HFC-20820-C1) which is quite low profile. I added doubled sided foam tape at the back/bottom aspect of the PSU and that straighten it out. Also, Right after I finished the build and had my enjoyable, the laptop would not turn back on. I checked my energy strip but that was not it. I thought for positive the PSU had died. I decided to test the energy cord first since it was effortless to do. Low and behold it was the AC power cord, by no means had that take place just before. Fortunate for me I have a lot of these around the house. More than all is not negative. There is space for additional tough drives under the 5.25 and 3.five bays, you'll have to get a bit creative..say double sided foam tape, drill holes on the bottom, and so on. The 120mm fan (Cooler Master R4-L2R-20AR-R1) fit nice and snug where a 3.5 side tough drive should go nearly like if it was intentional. I needed a case which would be beneath six inches in Height and not too wide like Desktop instances plus affordable. It now sits in the space involving my monitor and my desk. I can nevertheless have my KVM, External enclosure, mouse receiver and HD Docking Station all sharing the same space. The new system is for browsing, emails, Skype, WP, Pandora, just easy tasks. I did not want my gamer Rig on all the time just these easy activity and drilling a hole via my wallet. My technique: -Zotac GF8200-C-E-AMD Athlon II X2 235e-G. Talent DDR2 800 4GB-Seagate 2.five 250GB HD 7200RPM (Super Talent 2.5 to three.five Bracket)-Samsung SH-S223Q -Ubuntu 10.ten |
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Rating: Review Date: 08/31/13 |
Comment:
constructed in power, so you don't have external components to carry around, good piano finish, fantastic searching, get a lot of internal space to put your regular stuff like three.5in HD and complete size DVD drive. great value. If you are willing to take a opportunity and mod the PSU fan, you may possibly get a quiet case. You get what you paid for. Not also modest compare to other ITX case, so if you are certainly minimalist like me, you won't be amazed. the fan of the stock PSU does contribute to the most of the noise, wouldn't call this case quiet by any means. The power on/off button lacks a click feeling that you would count on for HTPC, but otherwise excellent case won't lead to just this little income |
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Rating: Review Date: 08/27/13 |
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Compact style, nice exterior paint job. Stealth drives. The internal three.5" drive bay isn't placed well being on the side and it does restrict air flow quite a bit. The side placement of the hdd with an IDE cable is practically impossible, but can be performed and mounting the hdd underneath the 5.25" drive isn't pheasable because the screw holes in the case are misaligned, probably for smaller sized hdds. I would like this case very a bit more if i could have mounted the hdd underneath the five.25" drive. All round, it's not that poor. It does have poor airflow which is made worse by mounting the hdd on the side. |
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Rating: Review Date: 08/27/13 |
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* Two three.5" bays (one front accessible and a single on the side)* Two SATA energy connectors on the integrated energy supply. * Ample space to stuff the long cables beneath the drive cage in the front.* With a five" to three.five" adapter, you could very easily use 3 hard drives in this point.* All the cons are minor, at least for me, so hence, five stars.* Case usually has a quite "sexy" look. The shiny exterior adds to this, I believe.* Incorporates rubber feet - if you want to hold it from sliding all over. They're adhesive, so pick wisely where you place them.* Worked beautifully with my Intel Atom board and low-profile memory. * The side really hard drive blocks some airflow.* Other than the PCI slot, there's no exactly where to mount any fan if heat had been a challenge. A die-tough case modder could put a single on the best with some cutting, assuming you don't thoughts scarring the shiny lid.* Lid fits on the case in an odd way - a small scary taking it off at first.* Maximum case shininess - fingerprints and dust will be obvious.* Power provide cables are a tiny too significantly - there's not sufficient area in the case to connect everything they have on that tiny guy, and they're long to boot. * I didn't install a CD/DVD, so I can't inform you if that would be simple or how the flip down door would work.* Reduce tough drive hangs 1 inch more than the back of the motherboard. Watch out on tall rear elements.* Energy supply bottom is 5cm away from surface of motherboard and covers back about 10cm of space. Once more, tall stuff may possibly not fit here. |
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Rating: Review Date: 08/26/13 |
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This is a quite excellent case but has a handful of issues* Tiny* Shiny * Regrettably the placement of the PSU, as pointed out by other people, is a tiny problematic. It would be nice if the PSU fan was placed in a various place, or if the PSU itself was a tiny slimmer so the Intel Stock Cooler had additional than 1mm of clearance.* Side challenging drive mounting is cool, but blocks the ventilation holes and is appropriate subsequent to the CPU. It would be superior if it was mounted at the front of the side instead of the back of the side.* Heat is certainly an situation unless you're careful I have this mixed with the Zotac 9300 mobo, a 1 TB WD HDD, 4 GB Gskillz RAM, Intel Wolfdale ƒ.5 Ghz Dual core), and DVD burner. Running XBMC tends to make a good slim HTPC to sit subsequent to my Television and game systems.I've had some heating problems with the case, so I just purchased a slimline CPU cooler (pure copper) and a PCI case fan. Hopefully that will assist.Its a good, quiet, slim combination. |
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Rating: Review Date: 08/25/13 |
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Price, miniITX w/ little PSU. Matches description HD placement. The unit has two areas for the HD but the best one is suitable beside the CPU heatsink which blows hot air onto the drive. The other place for the HD desires to have a further hole drilled to mount the drive towards the front of the case. With out that extra hole the sata cable would stop the CPU fan since it extends a tad to far. The cooling apsect of the case sucks. These are small setups and will contain the heat but addign a added fan would do wonders for the case. The PSU pushes no air at all and it touches the CPU fan. The front USB's seems a little flimsy but its functional. Excellent case for the cost. Has a couple of flaws but practically nothing that can't be easliy modified. I have a zotac m/b, 4gb OCZ ram, E8400 @ 3ghz and added a pci slot cooler which helped a lot with cooling. Don't know if I would acquire once more just depends if I can't discover one more case someplace else. The size is amazing for my goal. I gave it 3 stars for becoming "average" but if you add a case fan and drilled holes for the HD this case would be a 5Ǜ. |
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Rating: Review Date: 08/16/13 |
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Lots of area to perform with for an itx box. Beautiful finish all around, extremely good front panel. Power supply is additional than adequate for an Intel Atom board, sata optical and difficult drive, and anything else you can fit inside. The PSU fan (a pleasant surprise) is quite considerably silent, and makes much less noise than the northbridge fan on my Atom 330 mobo. It stays extremely cool with the one fan and the Atom 330 board. I will certainly use this case once again if I make any additional Atom machines in the future. A really neat case all around. The included energy cord is a tiny short, but you're almost certainly not going to be stretching it across the room anyway. No mention of the power provide cables in the descriptions, I wound up getting to buy a molex to sata converter. The PSU has three molex, 1 sata, and 1 floppy along with the 20Ʋ pin connector and a 12v connector. The hardest part of the develop was placing the optical drive in, it was a tight squeeze with the wires against the energy provide and you have to maneuver it around to get it in place. Please reviewers, don't complain about the case's lack of ventilation when you knew there had been no fans when you purchased it. That's like obtaining a Nintendo 64 and then taking an egg off since you can't play Crysis. What you see is what you get.If you're constructing a greater finish method, get a pci slot fan for five bucks. |
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Rating: Review Date: 08/12/13 |
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Picked this up for an atom board and it functions fantastic with lots of space. Lots of area... if that is a con. Box is just a lot larger than I anticipated. |
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Rating: Review Date: 08/09/13 |
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Affordable, Nice seeking case. The size of the case is good for what you can fit in it. Tends to make wonderful use of space. The psu intake fan is positioned straight over the cpu heat-sink. With the amount of area you have you have to obtain a low profile heat-sink(understandable), but these draw air in from the best. While the psu fan is also drawing air in and these fans are proper on best of each and every other producing a vacuum more than the heat-sink causing more than heating. Also the power button on the front of the case doesn't line up appropriately so you have to wiggle it about at times in order for it to function. |
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Rating: Review Date: 08/06/13 |
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This case is substantially more roomy than other Mini ITX circumstances I've noticed. It's as a result a bit bigger than some may well like, but it accommodates a complete-size DVD drive and three.5" hard drive, so if you're looking to build on the low cost, this is the way to go. 250W energy supply can't be beat; no opportunity of underpowering the Intel D945GCLF I'm running inside. The mirrored appearance on the front and glossy black exterior is quite slick-seeking, too. Maybe a bit huge if you're hunting to make a tiny computer system. But if you're just searching to build a system that has roughly the footprint of a mini tower case and a third the height (when arranged horizontally), this is the case for you. I assume the capacity to maneuver inside this case outweighs its slightly-bigger size, and it's undoubtedly desirable sitting on 1's desk. |
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Rating: Review Date: 08/01/13 |
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Little, Inexpensive, Lots of Space Gets Truly, Actually HOT!!!, I place 4 fans in this thing just to keep the pc from crashing, my watt meter only reads 120watts and the computer usually crashs with in a day or so dew to power failure. It was a disaster. I just gave up and stuck a full Server Casee beneath the Television. Up side 7TB in the new rig, 1TB in old. Dual Core two.4ghz in new, 1.2ghz C7 in oldYou do the math. _o... |
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Rating: Review Date: 07/25/13 |
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It's little, fits a full 5.25 optical drive. I believed the PSU was quiet sufficient. Not considerably air flow. I didn't think to buy a new HSF when I bought my processor and the power provide naturally wouldn't fit with the stock HSF. I ended up getting a silverstone nt07-am2. Even with the decrease profile HSF it was still a tight fit. I had a fanless HIS Radeon 3450 and it just got way too hot. I removed it and put in a slot cooler. I purchased a notebook challenging drive and mounted it beneath the optical drive. Exactly where the difficult drive was originally mounted I installed two SilenX ixtrema 80mm fans. The processor now sits at 43C idle and 50C load. Also the SATA energy connector on the energy supply wasn't capable to power either my blu-ray drive or my 2.5" sata difficult drive.J&W minix 790G mini ITX motherboardAMD BE-2400Silverstone NT07-AM2Transcend 2GB DDR2 800 SO DIMMWD Scorpio 160GB 2.five" SATA HDDSony BDUX10S blu-ray drive |
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Rating: Review Date: 07/21/13 |
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Handsome look and fantastic energy supply for the price tag. Glossy black paint is genuinely impressive. Front doors open with touch-latches: cool! LED indicators of power on and HDD activity a bit also dark but not genuinely an problem. |
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Rating: Review Date: 07/16/13 |
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general make high quality and finish of the case is great, incredibly well place with each other with solid rivets. connectors are middle of the road and really should stand up to normal use with out a problem. the psu is also nicely constructed (for the value). the case stands up vertical with the air vent holes straight above the heatsink of the CPU, memory and psu. this enables a very good thermal path for heat exchange to the outside world. the trick right here is to lessen heat within the box to hold it operating reliable. element selection is also important here and items such as ssd will hold it cooler and reduce the noise level as an htpc place of PSU in reference to the CPU heatsink result in the fresh air intake of the PSU to pull in incredibly hot air from the CPU. this could be causing the premature failures of this PSU. see suggestions in other thoughts (below). motherboard tray is riveted into the case, i drilled the rivets in one of the cases to modify for a nano-itx board i then replaced them with screws that i have in stock. would be good to have 1 or two far more really hard drive bays as i see a lot of area upfront for them. The case becoming best for a mini-itx board, i would suggest using the case with a smaller PSU like PicoPSU to let the cpu, heatsink, and so forth to breathe. Some of the motherboards in the itx form aspect add a dc-dc converter on the motherboard (built-in PSU) with a DC jack that mounts to the outdoors box, these converters produce extremely small heat due to the high efficiency and the energy provide that generates the heat is a wall wart that resides on the outside of the box to connect to the wall. doing this will add longer life to all of the electronics. the thermal management works properly when the space is opened up a bit by utilizing either of the two tips above. other heat saving concepts could be to use a ssd or 'laptop' drive to lower energy. If the PSU (power supply) is left out of the case, you have room to make a bracket for a fan or open as an air vent. due to the small volume of space in the case i would suggest an atom dual core CPU or reduce powered CPU to retain the personal computer at its prime. |
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Rating: Review Date: 07/13/13 |
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Particularly little form aspectStrong ConstructVisually attractiveThis case is really effortless to develop in. The incorporated energy provide has quick cables and permits for simple and neat cabling throughout the entire case.No sharp edges or case bending. The front panel only offers 2 USB ports while utilizing only a single motherboard header.There is one motherboard screw that is tough to install with the power provide in place. This case and energy supply works completely with the D945GCLF2 and D945GCLF2D motherboards from Intel. I have built 3 of these systems and they run very quietly in this case. |
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Rating: Review Date: 07/11/13 |
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Plenty of space for a mini itx board. Cables are extended adequate. Power supply is quiet. Power provide vents to the outside. Fan is just above the processor and pulls air into the power supply and the air exhausts out the back of the power provide. I ran the technique for 3 days to insure that there are no failures. Every little thing is working great. Shipping price is also higher for all cases. There is a plastic film on the shiny mirrored front of the case. It tends to make the case looked scratched. After the film is off, great finish. |
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Rating: Review Date: 06/30/13 |
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Comes with rubber feet which I liked. I was skeptical of the DVD push-button and door flap but each operate like a charm. The button is adjustable from the inside with a plastic slider to reach all DVD/CD buttons. Gorgeous black and silver finish suggests this case can live anyplace and look like it belongs. Super sturdy construction. Interior rails are robust but lightweight. Top rated case fits on completely, just have patience. PSU fan is noticeably quiet. I occasionally have to put my ear to the case to see if it's actually on or not. Door flaps are incredibly floppy and flimsy, but only noticeable whilst transporting the case. Energy button is flimsy and reset button is overly stiff and also deep -- often needs to be pushed with the tip of a pen. Removing the face panel reveals the buttons are held in spot with thin pieces of flimsy plastic. Only time will tell how long these buttons will last. Be gentile. Metal employed for the bay slots is incredibly thin and the holes don't always line up with standard drives. Motherboard tray is not removable. No standoffs included, mobo screws suitable into the case. Brackets incorporated to mount HDD vertically are plastic and can effortlessly be stripped or broken, be cautious. When sitting horizontal, the panel on the left pushes open to reveal 2 USB and headphone jacks (in+out). The top slot is for DVD/CD, bottom slot pushes open to reveal the 3.5" bay. Newegg's images don't show these attributes.Energy provide smells terrible like burning plastic or metal. I'm going to let it "burn in" for a week or two ahead of RMA'ing it. |
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Rating: Review Date: 06/20/13 |
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*Attractive*Cheap*Quiet *Front LEDs can be really tricky to see.*VERY tight fit for optical drives*PSU position appropriate more than CPU could make for some exciting heat issues for some (also really tight space involving them).*Sharp metal inside. |
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Rating: Review Date: 06/18/13 |
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Really nice hunting case, quite quiet for Atom Small Falls 2 Board. a lot of space for everything as far as I was concerned. initially itx case I've owned that I could essentially use the pci slot on my board. Also Shiny!! assume PS3, if you don't know what I'm talking about then just look at how properly you can deal with fingerprints ahead of you acquire. for what I needed it for it functions wonderful, I just wish it was a tiny smaller sized. I don't contemplate this a con due to the fact it may be a blessing in disguise taking into consideration how much of a discomfort it was to make my 1st itx pc in a smaller sized case |
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Rating: Review Date: 06/14/13 |
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I would like to modify my prior review in which I gave only a "good" rating simply because I didn't like the noise of the fan from the PSU. I have tested each and every component, a single by one, and the PSU is essentially just about silent. The noise I was hearing comes from the fan that cools down the chipset (it runs at 5000RPM for a 40mm fan!) and some noise from the challenging drive also. None Should have checked my details before posting. Sorry. |
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Rating: Review Date: 05/26/13 |
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Nice mirrored front & shiny! Comes with mini power provide. Also the front has nice hidden doors as well for front side usb/audio and optical drive. General Wonderful presentable case, can sit horizontal or vertical. Good rubber feet. Tight fit for most parts. Straightforward to see finger prints. (For the critical men and women) Rubber Feet take away from case a TINY bit when sitting sideways. Suggest smaller rubber feet & possibly completely mirrored case??? |
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Rating: Review Date: 05/26/13 |
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I factor it is one particular of the ideal I have so far. It is uncomplicated to assembly and spacious. Maintain in thoughts awareness of hanging wire, when you close the unit. I wish the price tag to be little lower. |
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Rating: Review Date: 05/24/13 |
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*Small*Good look and finish *Ventilation holes are misplaced*Power provide is incredibly low cost and generates a lot of heat*Layout of the case is not very good. Had to drill holes so that my tough drive wasn't directly in the heat zone*Power provide is correct over the CPU fanHoles The develop excellent appears a bit cheap when you fiddle with it but in the end it looks nice.Created this for my sister so that she can get a smaller desktop for her apartment that she can hide effortlessly.The build I applied it for is pushing the limits of this case but I anticipate other persons to be interested in generating the identical construct so :-Apex MI-one hundred Black-OCZ DDR2 800 4GB ƒx2GB)-Intel C2D Wolfdale E7400 two.8GHz-Zotac 7100 Mini ITX Mobo-Seagate Barracuda 7.2K rpm 160Gb HD-Pioneer 20X DVDR Black |
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Rating: Review Date: 05/24/13 |
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This case is fairly pretty on the outside. It is painted a pleasant glossy black. It has a complete height expansion slot. Front panel wiring is effectively engineered and uncomplicated to connect. The optical drive door flap is cool in an Apple sort of way. Comes with sticky rubber feet that can be put on the bottom or the correct side. A great deal for everything integrated. This issue is CRAMPED! The optical drive I initially tried to install was too deep and I had to pick one more 1. The vertical difficult drive mounting spot on the left side blocks airflow to the CPU, so I moved the difficult drive to the bay under the optical drive, but the screw holes are as well low and make it not possible to bolt in the HD. Front panel LEDs are quite dim. I constructed a router out of this case employing an Intel 945GCLF Atom board. I spent at least an hour repositioning the wires and internal elements to get the ideal airflow, and even following that the temperature monitors say 60C on the CPU while idling. Otherwise, so far it seems to function effectively and I'm pleased. |
Small, mirrored front and glossy black look excellent with each other. Power supply is quiet and...well...functions. Fingerprint magnet...seems like it ought to have an selection for a fan.