Hiper case gets stuffed

Product Anubis
Manfuacturer Hiper Group
Web hipergroup.com
Price: £104, $220

THE HIPER Anubis PC mid-size tower case is built out of aluminium alloy 6063 T5, which the Hiper guys claim is a world first.

The box still comes in at 10.7 kilos in weight (23.5 pounds), which is not a small mass for an aluminium case. However, there is no flexing to be seen anywhere, the case looks really tough. There is only one 120mm fan inside, and is positioned on top of the case. You can fit additional two 120mm fans, both positioned in conventional locations (traditional slot behind a CPU cooler and one in hard drive cage).

The Case

Fins are everywhere and this pic just show you how many fins there are.

Side panels can be removed and mounted very simply, just by opening the latches and removing the panels. This is one of easiest ways to open the case we've seen in years. We also liked the fact that the acrylic window is actually EMI shielded, and you can see the innards of your precious computer through a discrete mesh.

However, we do mind that the latches to open and close the side door are not up to the standard of the rest of the case. Their handling is a bit tricky, and if you try to open them at an angle, the handle will dip on one side and panel will remain closed. This is only a minor nuisance, however.

You can see eight brackets, holes for watercooling and plenty of room for, both 3.5-inch and 5.25-inch drives.

You can fit six 5.25-inch devices in the box, while hard drives come in their own enclosure that will fit four hard drives. In front of the cage there is a mount for 120mm fan, so if you need to cool down your RAID array, you might want to position one fan here.

Two holes at the lower part of the case (right of the fourth [Cough! Ed.] graphics card), are for external water cooling. Since there is no room for watercooling inside the case, Hiper's holes help avoid losing one PCI bracket. Also, seeing more rear brackets than the conventional seven is also welcome (it fits four [Cough again. Ed.] dual-slot graphics cards perfectly).

The thing that you will really appreciate is the fact that rubber is extensively used for component mounting. All bays include rubber strip on both sides that eats up the vibration. We experienced serious noise cushioning compared to Lian-Li's aluminium case in which this original system from AMD arrived.

Key ring comes with serial number of the case, while almost all the screws you need are tool-less ? ideal for DIYers

We also like additional equipment, like tool-free screws (all are finger-screwable). There is almost no need for any tools in order to assemble the case (not including the motherboard mounts), which is good news for those that want to do fast assembly of their future computer.

What to go in?

Fitting all of these in should not be a drag... We hope.

The goal of this case is to fit a system with four cores, four gigs of memory, four graphics cards, four hard drives, supporting four different optical standards (actually, a bit more, but BD/HD-DVD/WMV-HD/DVD were targeted). Codename for this configuration is "All Fours", but sadly, our hard drives and Blu-ray/HD-DVD drives got stuck at Croatian Customs, so we're installing a single Raptor 150GB and two DVD burners.

For starters, we have assembled the motherboard, placed a power supply inside the case (originally, we opted for Hiper 680W, but lack of 6-pin PEG connectors for graphics cards caused a decent patchwork with molex adapters). Today, the system is equipped with Hiper's 880W Type-R MkII power supply.

Installation went without problems, except for pushing the optical drives into their slots. Rubber holds there cause the drive to stray a bit outside the frame, so you need to remove the aluminium cover from above and below in order to make perfect fit. A minor nuisance, since it is fairly easy to remove the drive plates (just unscrew the screw with two fingers).

Spider is set to spread its legs

After quite a lot of fingering and some 40 minutes later, the computer was assembled in full. We closed the doors and booted it up. End result was a computer that works silently, has quite a good sound dampening for loud 10K Raptors (however, when three additional Raptors join in, we have no doubt what will be the noisiest part of the computer).

Starting the computer with buttons on top is actually quite practical, and it is good to see that Hiper fitted a good quality metal plate with USB and sound connectors as well. We would like to see a Firewire port there as well, but nothing is perfect in this world. In reality, only a small proportion of users will see the use of IEEE1394 connector (unless someone makes that Firewire stick really affordable).

In Short
For a first time, Hiper did an excellent job in building a computer case that has enough room for all components you might want to fit in. Three-way SLI would also fit with 8800GTX/Ultras, and the air flow design in the case allows for some experiments. Even though not many aluminum cases have dust protection, we would like to see such feature on a case with so many fins ? dust can simply hide anywhere.

The Good
Build quality. Design. Features such as factory-standard blowhole fan, drive cage and more brackets for dual-slot cards are good improvements. Holes for water-cooling are a welcome innovation.

The Bad
Front doors aren't easy to open, need to be revised in v2. The side panels have to have more precise with better latches ? a great concept is ruined by execution here.

The Ugly
No dust protection present means the inside of your computer is going to be as dusty as Nevada in summer.

Bartender's Report