Since this computer was going to be for my very young niece who will be using it for school and playing very simple learning games, I didn’t need to obtain anything high-end, so I decided on one of my favorite processors to date, the very energy minded AMD 4850e. Since the Allure is designed for micro ATX motherboards, I decided to use the Asus M3A78-T motherboard. With the processor and motherboard combo, the price was well under $150. I also added two gigs of RAM bring my total to $177. At the time of this review the IN WIN Allure is listed at $109. The last components I still needed were a full size power supply (minimal wattage needed), SATA hard drive, and an CD/DVD-R Rom drive. These last items I did have laying around from other systems, so for $270 or so I was able to assemble a very nice PC. There is still a little room inside to add an additional video card if my brother wanted to use the PC for a entry to mid-level gaming PC. The 4850e Processor did handle such games as Crysis pretty well. Of course we did add a high-end video card to play those video demanding games.
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| Installing the motherboard wasn’t too bad. With items like the cowling and hard drive bay which swings out of your way (sort of), the install was pretty easy. | The installation of the 4850e with heatsink was also an uneventful effort. |
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| With the periferal installed and cabled we come to notice there was no real cable management to help hide the cables, though in this small of a case it would be difficult to have anything extra packed in such a small space. | Swinging the cowling into place, it just squeeked into place under the DVD ROM. Which if the cowling was swung closed with pressure in the wrong place the Cowling would hang on the back of the DVD ROM. |
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| The next surpise with the cowling was the fact the hole for the heatsink didn’t line up with the heatsink. | Closer look at the alingment of the cowling to the heatsink. Though this is just one motherboard and not having another model available to test if the alignment would be better. |
Since I was using the AMD 4850e processor which is a very cool running processor, I wasn’t too concerned that the alignment of the cowling and the heat sink weren’t spot-on. The rest of the installation of the peripherals were pretty easy and uneventful. Once the PC was powered on and I went to put the operating system CD in the DVD-ROM drive I noticed the front door made it a little difficult with the ROM drive installed in the top most 5.25″ drive bay. I then lowered the ROM drive to the second drive bay. This allowed me to put the OS CD in the drive effortlessly. Now since the DVD-ROM drive was in the lower of the two 5.25″ bays the cowling did rub. This tight fit between the ROM drive and the cowling was of little concern though as it didn’t disfigure the cowling.
You’ve got to be kidding me.. it looks like a tampon box!!!!!