Internal Impressions
After carefully popping off the side panel, we can see that the Sonata will be able to hold a micro ATX motherboard or a standard size ATX motherboard. There is a 120mm Tri-Cool Case fan at the rear of the case with a 3 speed switch included. Below the fan are the spaces for the expansion cards, expansion cards in this case are installed simply with a screw- no fancy pants tool-less stuff here. Also, we noticed when removing the sound panel that there is anti vibration material installed on the panels which should help to create a silent running machine.
A maximum of eight drives can be installed in the Sonata 550 Plus, four spaces are for internal hard drives, and the other four spaces are external 5.25” bays for your drives; however a 3.5 inch converter is installed in one of those spaces. All drives are installed on sliders, but we’ll show you that later on.
At the bottom inside the chassis you will notice some clips fixed to a small mounting plate, these are the sliders for your 5.25” drives. The mounting piece for these clips can be removed if they really do bother you.
The front of the case can be popped open by pressing 3 clips, it will then swing open revealing two fan filters and space to install two 92mm Fans.
There are two possible methods to install the hard drives into this case. The first is to screw the drives onto trays with noise dampening grommets separating the tray from the hard drive. The trays then slide into position.
The second method is to suspend the hard drives from elastic straps. To do this you simply squeeze the hard drives through the straps. By doing so, the hard drives will be not touching anything which will lessen the vibrations by far. However, when I did so, the hard drive didn’t seem very secure and looked as through it could easily slide out of place.
At the other side of the case are some cable tidy clips which you can wrap all your excess cable round to tidy things up a bit. I found that if you make proper use of these you can create a very tidy case very quickly.
The power supply that is included with the Sonata 550 Plus is a 550W Antec NeoPower Power Supply. It comes with all the normal connectors a power supply would have plus 4x Sata, 6x Molex and 2x PCIExpress, this should be more than enough connectors for most people and of course its all modular which should tidy things up a bit. The fan inside the PSU is controlled by the temperature of the case, so as long as your pc is cool, the PSU should be working silently.
The power from this power supply is spread over 3 12V rails, one for motherboard, one for graphics card, and one for the drives and peripherals. By using these 3 rails it should help to produce a very stable computer and combined with active PFC and universal control input this should make a rock solid PSU for the average computer system.
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