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Casetronic Travla C137 Mini-itx Case
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(1563 total words in this text)
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Casetronic Travla C137 mini-itx Case Review
by: Erik Pettersen ( reviews AT byopvr.com )
URL: http://www.travla.com/Products/C137/c137.html
The Casetronic Travla C137 is certainly small, slim, and sexy, but how well designed and functional is it?
The cardboard packaging comes with a nifty handle
Casetronic was nice enough to provide us with a loaner version of their Travla C137 mini-itx case for this review (thank you!). The supplied unit was outfitted with a PCI riser card, PCI riser extension, instructions, 90 watt external "laptop brick" style power supply, DC-DC converter and of course the case itself.
The obligatory what came in the box picture
The case measures (WxHxD) 12.7" x 2.7" x 10" and accepts mini-itx form factor and some flex-atx motherboards.
Is this a sight to behold or what!
I tested the C137 using a VIA EPIA M10000 mini-itx board (thanks to VIA for providing the M10000! You can read our Review of the VIA EPIA M10000), a Crucial 256MB stick of DDR, a full sized Maxtor 120GB 7200RPM HD, and of course the ubiquitous Hauppauge Win-TV PVR350 encoder/tuner card.
The front panel of the C137 looks pretty sharp
The C137 is made out of aluminum and cold rolled steel. The anodized aluminum on the front panel looks slick, but what I really appreciated about the C137 is that it doesn't have any sharp or rough edges. I've never built a PC where I didn't maul myself on some jagged unfinished edge. Having everything either rolled over or cleanly/smoothly ‘machined’ meant a lot to me (and my delicate hands )
A look at the C137 innards
The C137 has a few different internal mounting configurations available depending on if you want to make use of the front compact flash reader slot, or use 2 PCI slots with a laptop hard drive. As the BYOPVR test bench is currently thin on parts and because it’s more cost effective, I used a full sized 3.5” hard disk. This limited my options somewhat, but was glad the case has the ability to accept a full hard disk (while only sacrificing one PCI slot/back plane). If you are going to put in an optical drive (CD or DVD) in this case it has to be a slim line one (and don’t forget to pickup a slim line drive to IDE adapter).
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