IN-WIN BUC: Just How Much $100 Can Buy
by Dustin Sklavos on May 9, 2011 4:28 PM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
- In-Win
- mid-tower
Conclusion: A Lot For a Little
While a hundred bills is more than entry level cases tend to go for, it's also a world away from the more expensive enthusiast cases on the market. What's impressive is that in many ways IN-WIN has given those cases a run for their money.
The IN-WIN BUC is a tremendously flexible piece of kit, full of features without seeming to be overrun by them. The hotswap bay is a little problematic with some drives, but it's also there on a $100 case, and it does work. Likewise, there's USB 3.0 connectivity, a drive/key tray on the top of the case, and a largely toolless assembly. The plastic/steel construction can feel on the chintzy side, but it also keeps the case comparatively light. Every time I've needed to work on my tower when it was in the Antec P182 and now the Corsair 600T, I've felt like I was going to throw my back out trying to move the thing. The BUC is frankly incredibly light compared to those two monsters.
It's not all sunshine and rainbows, though. With that construction you do get an enclosure that's not as effective at dampening noise. There's a lot you can do to mitigate it by using quiet fans and employing fan controls, but it just doesn't have a whole lot to really keep all that noise in and with a video card like the GeForce GTX 580 it might get a little louder than you'd like. The BUC also seemed to struggle a little with our overclocked setup; while it never locked up, it certainly ran hotter than we'd like. If your system is more conservative you're not likely to have any issues. I'm also not a big fan of the gamer-centric styling and I'm not sure how many gamers like their computer cases ostentatious. That may just be me, as I tend to prefer builds that look more austere, but many or our readership appears to feel the same. The Corsair 600T is about my limit. Finally, the hotswap bay works great in theory, but in practice the plastic trays bow so much with 3.5" drives installed that they become extremely difficult to actually remove.
What I'm left with, though, is a pleasant surprise in the form of a case that's inexpensive but feature-packed. IN-WIN clearly tried very hard to produce an enclosure that offers a tremendous amount of value and in that respect they succeeded. I know a lot of boutiques will tend to cut corners a bit on their case selection, so I'll spell it out: boutiques looking for a case that's comparatively inexpensive should go with the BUC. But what about you, the end user? Well, if you need a workhorse case that's feature rich, relatively easy to work in/with, and you don't have a lot of bread to spend on it, the BUC is an excellent choice and it made a believer out of me.
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Gigantopithecus - Monday, May 9, 2011 - link
Methodology looks very sound and I hope that Anandtech will be able to continue adding new cases to see how they stack up against each other (ha) while keeping the internal components constant.Silenus - Monday, May 9, 2011 - link
Nice to see case reviews from time to time.I'd love to see some Fractal Designs cases reviewed. Especially some of the new ones coming. I am chomping at the bit to get a better look at the Arc Midi Tower and the Arc Mini!
XiZeL - Monday, May 9, 2011 - link
mee too :) really want to know how the silent ones performe. might be changing my antec p183 for an FD define r3 or xlymrtech - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - link
I have a define R3. and holy shit i love it. replaced my cooler master HAF 922 with this. it's quiet as hell and also keeps my innards all nice and cool. i have a noctua noctua nh-d14 on my i7-960 and it idles around 38C and my 6870 twin frozr with fans at 40% idles around 34C. considering the noise it DOESN'T make, the price, the quality of the materials used, and the overall workmanship. i would reccomend it to EVERYONE.another good case to check out is the fractal design core 3000, it's like 90$ tax and shipping in (ncix) and it looks pretty top notch.
Mumrik - Monday, May 9, 2011 - link
I'd rather have had one and eight or nine internal 3½" bays...I have one optical drive that I never use and six harddrives and only more to come.
SquattingDog - Monday, May 9, 2011 - link
Clearly you've never used hot-swap bays then or thought about the fact that you can mount 4+ 3.5" drives in the space of 3x 5.25" bays with a 120mm cooling fan to boot (Lian Li do such a product and are not the only ones). Personally I would rather have seen FOUR 5.25" bays for this very purpose. Otherwise you can always get single hot-swap bays to go 5.25" --> 3.5".It's about different horses for different courses really - perhaps you should be looking at an eATX full tower instead?
Other food for thought, as I have been down this road before: if you have drives which are <2TB (hell, even if they are 2TB - you can now get 3TB drives), then secure erase and sell off your old drives and buy fewer larger drives. :)
Taft12 - Monday, May 9, 2011 - link
You can't have enough 5.25" bays. SATA can be hot-swapped, take advantage of this great feature!http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
(shameless plug, not associated with iStar, just a very satisfied customer!)
bji - Monday, May 9, 2011 - link
Just curious ... how much content do you have to steal to fill six harddrives?I personally have never filled more than 30 gb or so of a disk; I could see filling maybe 100 GB tops if I kept all of my home movies and photos on my local disk instead of in the cloud. I guess if you're a real 'power user' and buy lots of software and games maybe you'd fill another 200 GB? I just can't imagine filling more than 300 GB unless you're stealing content. Of course I know that there are the exceptional case where someone has, e.g. a photography business or something and they need to store terabytes of data legitimately but ... somehow I doubt that every person I see complaining about, e.g. the small size of SSDs, or the inability to put more than 6 hard drives in a case, has a legal use for all of that space.
On the upside for me, I am perfectly happy with a single 80 GB Intel SSD in my desktop and will be for years to come. SSDs are now in the price range where for my usage, they are cheap enough and are only getting better as they get faster.
Klinky1984 - Monday, May 9, 2011 - link
Oh yes, they must be stealing content. No one ever backups their DVD or BR collection, no one ever edits HD video. No one ever has thousands of high resolution photographs or large photo editing project files to deal with. No one ever has hard drives to put in a RAID setup for performance or redundancy reasons. Yep, must be stealing content, because _you_ can't think of any legitimate use.Shall we just make it illegal to own multiple hard drives?
JarredWalton - Monday, May 9, 2011 - link
For the record, just my AnandTech folder for the past four years checks in at a respectable 70GB. Add in my personal pictures and that's another 30GB. I just upgraded cameras and can now shoot 1080p24 video, which only chews up around 1.3GB for a 10 minute clip. Since the start of 2011, I've only sucked down 13GB with home videos of my family, and I don't even shoot video more than a few times per month!My desktop has a 1TB hard drive that is around 70% full, because I happen to play games on it. My Steam folder currently sits at nearly 200GB, and I haven't even installed most of my Steam games on this system (e.g. I don't have the original Half-Life, or the various HL2 episodes, installed). Honestly, I can't even get by with less than 256GB of storage on a system that I plan to use for "everything", which is why SSDs are tough to use on a single drive laptop.