Origen (UNEED/DIGN) X11

[bomba]

I'm in the process of building up a new HTPC in the version 2 UNEED X11 case. The X11 IMO is beautiful with all aluminum construction, USB VFD with integral IR receiver and full support for XP Media Center edition remote codes and MCE VFD display. The X11 is fairly compact, yet uses a standard ATX PSU, supports full-height PCI/PCIe boards, 1 optical drive, 1 3.5" floppy or flash reader and up to (4) 3.5" hard drives.

In regards to quiet operation, all hard drive mounts are equipped with rubber dampers and the cooling/airflow is decent with (2) 80mm rear exhaust fans and multiple bottom intakes, including one with an 80mm intake fan, directly beneath the main HDD cage. Stock fans are 2000rpm JAA fans with ceramic bearing and "axis." Rear fans are soft mounted via grommets, but the intake was supplied hard-mounted and was quite noisy as a result. I've since soft-mounted the intake via EAR fan mounts and undervolted the fans nominally. With an A64 Venice, Nforce4 motherboard with zalman passive NB heatsink, 330W Seasonic S12, Nexus fanned Zalman 7000 and dual WD 400G SATA drives, the HTPC is very quiet. I am impressed with the ceramic bearing fans and the loudest source, by far, is the seek noise from the WD drives (AAM on full quiet). I will add that I have (4) WD 320G SATA drives in a LX-6A19 HTPC, that are much quieter in seeks than the (2) WD 400G SATA drives in the X11. Not sure if this is simply that the 400G drives are not as quiet, or from some other factor such as the aluminum case or inferior HDD damping? I was amazed at the noise reduction resulting from changing the intake fan from hard to soft mounting, and attribute that to the aluminum case construction.

Biggest negative for me is that the case was a b*tch to assemble, drive mounting especially. The X11 and X15e are currently hot cases in the HTPC community. In my opinion, the X11 is an excellent candidate for an SPCR review. Note that this case is very similar to the X15e which sports a front panel 7" touchscreen.