The Banchetto
103 from Microcool uses a rather very special design which requires special attention during the installation of the components.
The Banchetto 103 features two different levels, top one, where we mount
motherboard and two 120 mm fan supports, which are positioned exactly where overclocker or tester needed them.
Unfortuantely, it comes only with two fan supports included while the
earlier reviewed Banchetto 101 comes with four fan supports. The fan supports
on the Banchetto 103 can be mounted near the CPU VRM area, near the memory slots as
well as any other part of the motherboard, which allow users to push more air to graphics cards and the
PCH. The aforementioned levels
are made of methacrylate shelves, and all other components are
made from steel cradles. The Benchetto 103 looks solid and sturdy and it
is more
stable than the Banchetto 101, simply because
this one is made for micro-ATX motherboards and the Banchetto 101 had
three levels. The dimensions of the Banchetto 103 are much smaller than the
Banchetto 101. We
tried to install CPU and memory POTs for small xtrerme overclocking
session with LN2 and it was quite good and its stable, although it
is still too light for our taste with 5.5kg weight, the Banchetto 103
surfaces are well made and it is stable enough. The Banchetto 103 has a single drive bay which
can house two 5.25-inch drives and also features two cradles which support up to
two 3.5-inch
HDDs or 2.5-inch SSDs . There is also a nice place for an ATX power supply. We tried
the largest PSU we
currently have in lab and it fits perfectly. Unfortunalety the Banchetto 103
does not give you the
possiblity to mount any radiators due to its small dimensions.
Microcool made two incisions to allow better management of SATA cables,
24-pin power supply cables and 8-pin CPU power. We would like to see
holes to allow Power and Reset cables to be routed like we had on the Banchetto 101. The top level
also has room to mount the supplied Power and Reset buttons, just below
the product name. |