Conclusion
The Antec Sonata 550 Plus is certainly something for Antec to be proud of. Its incredible looks, simple design and finish set this case apart from the rest. The case itself is also very structurally sound, the steel that has been used is of very good strength and certainly won’t bend, while the paint job is of very high quality and is hard wearing.
Antec have certainly thought about cooling and quietness with this case. Including it with a 120mm fan and mounts for two 92mm fans, they’ve really thought about the people that are going to be buying this case. All the sound deadening material and methods that have been used certainly work, although I’m not too sure on the ‘flying hard drive method’. When I booted this machine up and started playing BF2, I could hear only one thing inside the case, the graphics card. With only one 120mm fan at low speed and no other chassis fans this cooling was adequate for my system and the temperatures produced were of very low degrees.
The Test system that I installed in this case was quite rushed, however it worked straight away and also seemed to be rather tidy. This is all due to the modular PSU, the cable tidy clips but also the back side panel which has a small gap between that and the motherboard back plate. This means you can hide many of your cables behind the motherboard plate.
There are only a few problems that I can see from the Sonata 550 Plus. Firstly the fans, although there is space to install two additional 92mm fans, most people will probably want a 120mm fan instead of two 92mm’s. Also, the Hard Drive Elastic Mounting idea is good, although it isn’t safe at the moment and could use more work, however I can see this being a very good idea if the idea was looked at more carefully- maybe including more and tighter elastic will solve the problem of the hard drives flying out.
The only other problem is that you can’t install a PSU after you’ve installed a motherboard in this case, which could put some people off this case, however its not really much of a problem for most people.
This case could be perfect if some of the problems mentioned above were sorted. But as it stands, I’m going to award this case 4/5.
Thanks go to Antec for providing us with this case.
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