Antec enclosures: Feature request

Welcome to Sweclockers!

I just stopped by to make some feature requests and let you know what I would really like to see in an upcoming enclosure (chassis) model from Antec, preferably in the Performance series. I sent you an e-mail about this not so long time ago. Your response was mostly like "maybe" since you didn't really have any good information about it, of course. But since you guys are now guests here at my home base so to speak here at Sweclockers I would like to take the opportunity to open up this question here and hear what you and other members here think about it.

• These are my feature requests.

• USB 3.0

• PC Speaker (aka tweeter)

• LED

• 2,5" Drive bays

USB 3.0
Since USB 3.0 seem to be a success and more and more USB 3.0 products are finding their ways to the market. USB 3.0 can't be ignored now and it's only a matter of time before it becomes common place and replaces the older USB 2.0. USB 3.0 is fully backwards compatible with USB 2.0 so why hold on to USB 2.0?

The true adoption of USB 3.0 will start at the time when PC makers start to introduce it in their new PC models. After all, it is here that USB is used the most, for connecting peripheral devices to the PC.

At the time of this writing, motherboards that support USB 3.0 and SATA III (6 Gbit/s) technology are still very rare. However, those boards that do support these new technologies only have two ports of each at most. These ports are provided by the NEC and the Marvell chip on the motherboard. In other words they are not natively supported in the chip set.

Manufacturing costs must drop if chip makers like Marvell and NEC are going to be able to produce new chips with support for more than just two ports. This will be no match for companies like Intel and AMD. If anyone can do it, they can! So what we need is native support for these technologies in the boards themselves without the use of supporting chips.

Only recently, I believe AMD released a new chip set - the 890GX - which I believe is the first chip set to support USB 3.0 natively. The P65 and the X68 chip sets from Intel are not too far behind. The X68 is expected to be released in second quarter this year and the P65 in first quarter next year. They both are rumored to have native support for both the USB 3.0 and SATA III.

Just two USB 3.0 ports on the back I/O while six more are USB 2.0! It's really silly when you think about it. I will personally go for nothing but full support on all ports! That's what I want to pay for, I want to pay for new technologies and push the development forward, not go backwards. I expect you all to play your part and deliver the good. You make it, and I buy it? How does that sound?

I am planning on custom building a new PC for this year and I am considering getting a new fresh chassis too instead of using the current one. I currently have my old good P160W. It fits my needs nicely and does what it's supposed to. But if I decide to get a new chassis for my new build I would like to see that it has USB 3.0 support on the front panel. What's the use of having full support for USB 3.0 in hardware if you have to crawl to the back of the computer to make use of it? Right?

PC Speaker (aka tweeter)
Another thing that I would wish for is a simple tweeter (no not Twitter) - you know, the old school kind of PC speakers that were built-in on the motherboard in old computers or occasionally on the PC chassis. This is something that I have been missing very much with so called modern day motherboards and PC chassis for many years. It's just very uncommon and it's almost totally obsolete on the motherboard market today. Some boards feature a LED display as a replacement for the old PC speaker, but most of them are lacking it all together. So it would be a nice touch if my new chassis had a PC speaker, or preferably both a PC speaker and a LED display. That would be both cool and useful. I would definitely buy it.

LED
When I say LED display I'm talking about having a LED display on the front panel module like the one found on P160W but one that can display BIOS error codes instead of temperature or both of them.

2,5" Drive bays
Now the drive bays. Why are there no desktop chassis with 2,5 inch drive bays? You are aware of the fact that SSD disks are commonly using this size now-days? If you ask me, you could just do away with the two internal 3,5 inch bays that were traditionally used for floppy drives and make place for three internal 2,5 inch bays. I rather have several smaller disk drives (SSD drives, what ever) than just few really big ones (I loose lots of data if they die or more like when they die since they do die eventually and I need big disks to make backups).

Did I mention how much I love your Performance chassis? Yeah, I'm totally sold on them. I recommended the P182 to a friend of mine and he totally loves his too. It was just a little bit tricky fitting a Corsair HX520 PSU in the PSU appartment and closing it all with all the cables running on the right side instead of inside the case, it's a bit tight.

Now that you have read my wishes, I hope you will treat them as your commands and obey by them. You simply make it and I'll buy it! Deal?