Case Overclocking Performance  

Can a case like the Minuet 350 support high levels of overclocking? Conventional wisdom has been to use specialist gaming cases such as the recent Antec 902 V3 with a host of fans to cycle air quickly and a lot if internal space to give breathing room and add more hardware. Here we have only one fan but the pathway that airfolow takes is so close together that it works very efficiently. Here's what we were able to achieve:

The first screen capture shows the system running at stock speed. All our tests were done at stock speed. The second capture gives an idea of the incredible overclocking potential of not only Intel's latest Sandy Bridge processors but, more relevantly in this case, the capabilities of this remarkable enclosure. Over 5.5GHz with a stock cooler! That's more than a 2GHz performance boost. We ran stress tests for 2 hours at this astronomical speed without any problems for the CPU or the case.

Synthetic Performance - 3D Mark Vantage

Intel may have great processors but even their latest on-chip graphics, the HD3000, performs poorly compared to discrete add-in solutions. The Sapphire Radeon HD6870 Vapor-X we are using here is easily ahead of the 4 entry level and midrange cards shown. The reason we selected these cards is that other HTPC enlclosures can only accept half height cards and the 4 models shown in the graph are the best graphics cards available in half height format. In other words, people using a different enclosure would be forced with settling for a mediocre graphics card as that is all that would fit into their case. 

Gaming Performance  

Performance in this first person shooter is great at any resolution. If you're going to watch movies at 1920x1080 then you might as well play games at that resolution too. The HD3000 is provided for comparison only - the key to our experiment is to use a high end graphics card. 

HAWX is more of a flight simulator and is even playable on the HD3000.

The current favourite of horror games is Resident Evil 5 and when the graphics options are set to maximum quality the results are stuning. Playing at 1920x1080 is a joy to behold.

HTPC Performance

What about HTPC performance? Isn't the Minuet 350 a bit big compared to offerings from Zoltac and Asus?

This is misleading as there are some key factors most of the public is not aware of. Firstly, these micro designs all rely on processors such as Intel's Atom and Nvidia's ION chipset. In reality, they can barely cope with 1080i video let alone 1080p or even 3D Blu-Ray. When they do play high definition content the CPU utilisation is usually very high (often at 100%) meaning that not enough processing power is available for decoding. This results in two types of visual defect - dropped frames which are seen as stuttering and incomplete decoding which results in blockiness, smearing and similar artifacts. Both of these can be quite annoying when sititng down to enjoy a movie. So how does our system compare?

Here we see a 1080p clip rendered in flawless perfection and the CPU utilisation of our test system stays below 15%.

Even high speed action can be reproduced effortlessly using a fraction of the computing power available. If this was an Atom based processor the picture above would be a blocky mess.

Conclusion

The Antec Minuet 350 is the perfect combination of aesthetics and functionality - looking stylish in a rack amongst expensive Hi Fi components yet capable enough to be used for a high end games machine and even supporting extreme levels of overclocking. It's too easy to pigeon-hole this enclosure simply based on looks but deeper inspection shows that it can do much more - perhaps this is the fashionable case to take to LAN parties, friends will be impressed by the looks and astounded by the performance.

We can't find anything wrong with this case (we thought really hard and perhaps Antec might consider putting in a peelable veneer for the face of any optical drive since its virtually impossible to find one the colour of the case front) so apart from that minor observation the Minuet 350 is ideally suited to fulfiling a multi-purpose role with a scope far wider than most would envisage from just looking at it.

We award the Antec Minuet 350 our Hardware Review Gold award.

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