Hey, folks. Had my Cerberus come in on Friday, thought I would jump in and share my experiences so far.
Looking through the thread, it seems like I have a bit different use case than most folks here. I keep my PC in the living room for gaming (VR and pancake) and as a Plex server (multiple remote users). As such, I need bunches of storage and am aiming for the least amount of noise possible.
For those interested, you can find my pre-Cerberus build here. I'll mostly just focus on the case for now.
So, I came from a NAS-focused Lian Li PC-Q25. The hot swappable HDD cage inside that thing is hugely appreciated, but ventilation and noise were pretty poor. When I upgraded from an i5 6500, I did a super poor job of installing the Noctua cooler (too much thermal paste), so my temps were through the roof (low 90s, occasional 100s on a couple cores during transcodes). Anyway, I fixed that when I rolled into an 8700k (though I don't think I've run any transcodes yet). Temps have been a lot better (80s under load in something like Rise of the Tomb Raider), idle at maybe mid-30s. Since switching to Cerberus, I'm looking at about 29 at idle. I haven't done anything CPU intensive since switching, so I'm hesitant to give a load temp. Okay. On to the case.
First impressions were good. Packing was nice. I wasn't exactly wow'd by the materials immediately, but I began to appreciate it once I was working inside. Panels are nice and stiff, but definitely bowed as mentioned elsewhere. They look fine when attached to the case though, so no big deal. Here's some comparison photos with the PC-Q25. For reference (and assuming my math is right), the PC-Q25 is about 20.4L.
Cerberus is just a little thinner and a little taller, but comes in with a smaller overall volume.
Alright, building impressions. Cerberus has
a lot of individual pieces (on account of the modularity). Going in, I thought it was pretty overwhelming, but the screws guide on Sliger's sight was a godsend and I slowly sort of "figured it out" as time went on. I'm used to having little-to-no cable management options and needing to plan installation steps ahead of time. In that regard, Cerberus definitely got me a few times. So far, it's been a pretty standard experience, to be honest. Pretty happy with it.
But, here's the bad parts.
Per post #4601, I was expecting to put my 3.5" HDDs on the top of the enclosure using the top mount. Unfortunately, I was
not able to do this, on account of two separate factors.
The first is room. If I want to keep the drives straight, my RAM doesn't allow me enough clearance to keep it in-line (it's also worth noting that I'm using Vengeance LPX low-profile modules). If I slide the the bracket down a notch so that I can clear the RAM, the Infini-vents (Infinity vents?) don't align with the brackets.
As you can see, the top holes don't fit within in the grid. Now, this
shouldn't be too much of a problem, because there's enough room for at least one bracket if you install it at an angle. However, the particular brackets that I received are bunk. I can't get the supplied screws to thread through the HDD bracket's holes. I tried two holes on each bracket and didn't have any luck. As it happens, one of the brackets has a clogged hole. At first, I thought it might not have been drilled through all the way, so I tried pushing it out with no luck. Upon closer inspection, it looks like someone may have snapped off a screw in the thread. The tool marks on the edges are not from me.
Here's as far as I could get the case screws into the bracket before hitting a wall.
My "solution" was to mount the drives on the bottom. One bracket is actually using the HDD screws and is mounted directly to the disks. I had to mount the third drive upside down, so I wasn't able to do that on the second bracket. I just used the case screws to keep it semi-mounted. It works for now, until I can sort out an exchange of some kind with Sliger. I emailed them yesterday and, judging by this thread, I'm sure we'll be able to work something out.
Long term, I'll be looking at a Nvidia 80 series GPU, custom waterloop, four HDDs. I feel pretty good about being able to do all of that, but I'll need to move some stuff around to know for sure.
I'm really happy with everything so far, and am excited for what's to come. Functionally, the HDD brackets aren't exactly awesome, but they get the job done (provided I can get the screws in all the way
).
Here's the final photo for this round. I didn't spend almost any time on cable management since hopefully I'll be in there re-working it within in the next week or so (new GPU and new HDD brackets, hopefully), so sorry that it's ugly.
