Antec Lanboy - Power
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Power
Power comes in the form of an Antec 350W power supply. No doubts about quality here. Antec have almost become better known for their power supplies than their cases.
Typically for an Antec PSU the included unit has two fans, both lighted blue, an 80mm in the back...
and a 92mm on the bottom. A nice touch.
Leads are pleasantly long, leaving you plenty of routing options. Power delivery is clean and consistent as you'd expect. 400W+ might have been nice but since LAN boxes tend to lack all the extras like DVD drives and such then its an understandable decision and never became a problem.
Installation
The only real problems with installing hardware come from the LANBOY's very cramped confines. It soon becomes apparent that every last fraction of an inch was shaved off wherever possible. To screw in the cards for example you take off the plastic doohickey on the back which holds the screws, revealing the mounting holes which are actually accessed from outside the case.
It felt a little odd to be honest but on reflection I can't really see a reason why it shouldn't be done that way. The only real downside is the inability to use thumbscrews. Installing the motherboard was a bit of a squeeze but not excessively so.
One thing I did notice was that my Alpha PAL 8045 and Vantec Tornado fan half covered the 92mm PSU fan restricting its airflow (and possibly creating a source of noise) To be perfectly honest this is about as tall as HSF combos get but I'm guessing that most LAN party-goers wont have stock cooling installed. Replacing the Tornado with a regular sized fan gives the power supply much more room to breathe.
The drive cage, while horribly flimsy, impresses with its ease of installation and removal which is a feature we've grown used to with Antec cases. Once locked in place it isn't about to go anywhere.
Installing the 5-1/4" drives is a little odd. Only one drive rail is used per drive on the right side - a necessity without a removable right side panel but the left side is an old school screw-through-the-cage affair. One nice feature is that the drive rails come mounted on the metal bay covers so its unlikely that you'll have to search for them if you want to install a second drive.
Plugging it all in revealed few surprises. The USB ports are a pain to connect as usual since the industry hasn't seen fit to settle on a standard pinout for USB headers meaning that you have to plug each wire in separately. Unusually for me I managed to get it right the first time! Cables from the front bezel are plenty long enough to do some neat wire routing.
Fans are easy to install. A plastic fan cage (in a particularly violent shade of green) in the front holds a single 80mm fan while cooling duties at the back are handled with a traditional screw mount over a reassuringly non-restrictive punched grille.
I also installed a blue cold cathode light in the case and I must say with the nice shiny reflective interior and impressive window it looked great.
Performance and cooling
This being a case aimed at the gaming market, what better test than to play some games? After a clean windows install I loaded up the truly awesome Splinter Cell and started sneaking around. About ten minutes into the game I encountered a spontaneous reboot. Uh oh. I've had this problem a couple of times in the past so I knew the standard things to check. CPU temperature was fine, everything was plugged in right, all the fans were working. So I tried again. I lasted about five minutes this time. Maybe Splinter Cell was acting flaky so I tried a few other games. Morrowind - Crash. UT2003 - Crash. Starlancer - Crash. I even tried the near-Neolithic Freespace 2 (A game which permanently lives on my drives anyway) Crashed again. This is not looking good. Puzzled I opened up the case and tried running with the side off and a desk fan blowing into the case to see if it was a heat problem. Everything ran just great. Peering in puzzlement at the entrails of the PC (They teach you to do this if you're an engineer. You get extra credit if you suck your teeth and shake your head) I noticed the gap between the back of my Ti4200 and the back of the hard drives. Or rather, the lack of one. To flow from front to back in this case the air needs to pass through a gap of about two inches or so, a good inch of which will be restricted by the cables from the drives, even with neat wiring. Uh oh indeed. Of course very little air gets through. The air sucked in the front simply heats up and circulates around in the lower half of the case, neatly negating the effects of the the Thermaltake copper cooler and copper ramsinks on my video card. In fact just to check this out I put the side of the case back on and ran Morrowind until it crashed. Then I touched the video card cooler. Ouch. I could have fried an egg on there. I was honestly worried that this case might have damaged my video card. Maybe you could run it with an older, shorter video card but I really can't see anyone turning up to a LAN party sporting a Riva 128.
Herein lies the deal-breaker folks. I have used all kinds of cases ranging in price from $30 and up and I have never come across a case with such awful cooling. Sure I could hack some holes in the case and add a few more fans but I shouldn't have to. For a case marketed as a gamers case this is simply inexcusable. Just to be sure I reinstalled all the same components in my regular case - a Chieftec midtower to see how the same setup would fare. It ran flawlessly.
Conclusion
LAN parties are a big deal nowadays and not just for playing games. They serv as a focal point for the sharing of ideas among PC enthusiasts and a forum for showing off the case mods we spent so many hours on. When you're looking at sizes for LAN cases, less is definitely more. Weight even more so. The LANBOY certainly scores in these categories. However it all comes to nothing if you can't actually use it to play games. While the construction quality of the LANBOY is doubtful at best, it pales into insignificance beside the cooling problems.
Here's the deal. The LANBOY is not designed from the ground up to be a LAN case. Where are the front headphone and microphone sockets? Where are the thumbscrews? Where is the ruggedness it needs to survive the countless times it gets moved? Putting a carrying strap on a generic, small aluminum case does not make it a LAN case. For LAN parties, it's next to useless. For regular non-gaming use it's marginal at best. Frankly I wouldn't want my MP3 server in it and my MP3 server is a 233MHz Packard Bell.
This is a deeply disappointing product from a company whose name has been synonymous with quality. Looks like I might get that hernia after all.
Pros
Lightweight
Great power supply
Nice accessories
Easy installation
Cons
Flimsy construction
Cools like a dog
Not enough front ports for a LAN case
Terrible cooling
No hard drive cooling
Did I mention the horrible cooling?
Thanks for joining us today for the Antec Lanboy PC Case Review. We were pretty harsh on the box, but LAN gamers deserve the best. Want to give us hell in the forums about this review? We welcome it, head on in to the Dev Hardware Forums.
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