By: Frag-girlie

Company: AOpen

In this day of building your own computer, there is one question we are all faced with:  which case is right for me?  Today we will look at AOpen’s HQ08 Full Tower case.

Let’s look at the specs:

Housing Material: Metal

Housing Type: Full Tower

  Main Board Size: ATX/microATX/Full AT

  Disk Drive Bays: 5.25"x5/0, 3.5"x1/7 (external/internal)

Dimensions: 16.54"(D)x7.80"(W)x23.23"(H) / 420mm(D)x198mm(W)x590mm(H)

  Power Supply: 300W ATX (Ball bearing fan in US), UL/CSA/CE/VDE/S/D/N /FI/FCC DoC Certified

Ventilation: Air Vents with Optional 2nd DC fans

FCC, CE & Novell: Ready

Net Weight: 28.60 lbs. / 13.0 kg

Gross Weight: 31.90 lbs. / 14.5 kg

Volume: 3.1 Cu. ft.

Certification: Novell certification with AOpen motherboards

The HQ08 is appealing to the eye, and at first glance you can see that the case can pack a punch. The above picture depicts the HQ08 with blue trim, but it also comes in gray, aquamarine, and green for variety. This case has all the standard features that earmark a quality case: rolled smooth edges, many drive bays (internal and external), a removable motherboard tray, two removable 3.5” trays, and a large, open interior. The quality of this case, which is constructed of 1mm thick sheet metal, is beyond question.

Putting together this case is a lot like putting together a puzzle, a process to go through, but not a difficult one.  Both the side and top covers are  removable.  While the removable top cover is an excellent idea, you do have to remove it to get to the side cover.  Once you open it up, you’ll likely have the easiest access to the rear of the drive bay area that you will ever find. This means you can actually look down to the connections of all your CD-ROMs, hard drives, and misc. drive devices, rather than having to strain your neck looking around the side of the case. 

When I began assembling this system I noticed the motherboard stand offs right away. They are small, brass standoffs that screw into the removable motherboard tray.  With the removable motherboard tray, you are able to put all your cards in place and secure them before you install the tray.  Then it was just a matter of sliding the motherboard tray back into the case and screwing it back down to the case itself. The motherboard tray mounts on a track so sliding it in and out is very easy.  The size of the tray as well as the size of the case makes it easy to do work within your case. The HQ-08 comes with 7 slots and 13 drive bays. This is a lot of room, more than what the typical user would require.  Then you just have to mount up the hard drive and CD-ROM, and route the cables. One thing that could be of concern to some people is that the upper set of 3.5” drive bays are too high for some motherboards to stretch a UDMA66 hard drive cable to.

The HQ-08 comes with a 300W ATX (Ball bearing fan in US) high efficiency switching power supply with a plethora of connectors for hard drives and floppies.   Which is useful if you start adding fans and other things. You shouldn’t have to go to your local computer shop for any Y connectors.

The airflow design of the case differs somewhat from the traditional plan, and at first glance, there seems to be very little open area between the bottom compartment, where the motherboard, internal hard drives, and add-on cards would be located, and the upper compartment where the external drives would be located.  This will generally contribute to poor airflow that is complicated by the fact that the lower compartment doesn’t have any open grills for hot air to escape.  If you look beneath the power supply, you will notice the 300W power supply that AOpen uses draws most of its air supply from underneath rather than from the front.  That’s pretty neat because your add-on cards are right below that power supply.  The front of the power supply does have some smaller grilles, so there is still some air that is exhausted from the drive area.  Even with these modifications, I feel you will need to pick up some extra fans to keep this thing cool.  Because when you’re working with a full tower like this, it isn’t wise to skimp on the cooling.  The good thing about that is there are two additional fan grilles at the back of the case above the power supply that can house 80mm fans.  For those over clockers out there, you will probably have to add even more fans than what is provided for.  

With all this in mind, we decided to build a server to truly test this case.  We plugged in AOpen’s AK731394 motherboard along with a 48x CD-ROM, 60 gig hard drive, added 512 megs of memory, a PC 133 and a powerhouse 1.1Ghz Athlon.  Initially we ran this machine with the one fan that was included and found the CPU temperature at 95° Fahrenheit, so we installed a second fan in the bottom of the case to see what would happen and the temperature dropped almost ten degrees to 85.2° Fahrenheit, an improvement to be pleased with for sure.

We have been very impressed with the hardware AOpen has been producing and we plan on using this machine to host some LAN parties this summer. We are currently running it as our dedicated game server for titles including Giants:  Citizen Kabuto, Quake 3 and Gore.  We have been very satisfied to this point, and overall feel AOpen has done a great job with the HQ-08 case.  They include a lot of features at a great price, who could ask for more?

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