On Monday I picked up the computer case, additional bracket and 4 pin power cable from ITX Canada, a nondescript door on the back side of a concrete block building in a business park in Markham. ITX Can. is more of a parts warehouse rather than a full-on computer store, where they ship parts rather than deal with walk-in customers.
Unfortunately they gave me the wrong 4 pin cable, and even more unfortunately I didn't realize it until after I'd gotten home. Turned out that they didn't even have the correct cable in stock. *sigh* No biggie, it happens, many companies have a hard time keeping their website's stock tracking up-to-date, but now I need to make my own 4 pin cable. Luckily I have several old computer power supplies I can scavenge for parts to make my own. :)
On Wednesday the courier tried to deliver the rest of the components and, of course, no one was home, so on Thursday I drove to their head office after work (in a driving slush storm) to pick them up. From now on I have to remember to get packages courier'd to my work address, as there's never anyone home now that Colby has found a job.
Once I got everything home I quickly realized that there was no way to fit the mobo and power supply into the case I'd bought. Augh! So this evening after work I had to make another trip back to ITX Can. to return the first case and pick up a Mini Box VoomPC 2 Mini ITX Case instead. About twice the price, and good gods but it's heavy! But everything fits, here are the components attached to the case's base plate: The case's accessory board (USB, power LED & stereo output), the power supply and the mobo.
But I've run into two problems with the cables supplied with the case.
The cable to connect the front panel USB on the accessory board to the mobo is far too wide. It overlaps the pins next to it for connecting the case's power LED to the mobo (or power supply).
Hopefully you can see what I mean in the photo. This is just a poor cable choice on Mini Box's part, they should have supplied a slimmer square cable and not this chunky thing. I'll have to go looking for a replacement.. or forgo having a power LED. That might work too as I dislike devices that have LEDs glowing away on them all the time, eating up power while being ignored 99.9% of the time.
Then I found that the cable for connecting the mobo's Case Fan to the Case Fan-In on the accessory board is about five centimeters too short.
Another screw up by Mini Box. They should have provided a cable that can reach anywhere within the area that a Mini ATX mobo fills, not something that only works with specific mobos.
Other than these two very poor cable choices it seems like a good case, there aren't many other choices, and the helpful staff at ITX Can. will probably lynch me if I try to return this one too. ;)
I'll have to make trips to Canada Computers and Sayal to buy better cables and/or the components to make my own.
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