After reviewing an Acousti Products 80mm fan a few weeks ago a nice gent from the company emailed me and asked whether I knew someone who would like to review a new quiet case they had for sale. As my living room sounds a bit like a miniature Heathrow at times I replied I knew of just the chap. So a few days later I lugged a big heavy box back home from work and got down to looking at this most impressive Super Midi ATX Tower case. The AC6607b's major selling point is its super quiet properties. As the entire inside of the case is plastered in sound absorbing foam it is marketed as the perfect case for professional or home musicians, creative types or performance gamers.

The case looks good when it's all sealed up. The black metal is a little bit glossy but nothing too flashy. The facia is curvy and nice to look at while retaining a dignified restraint in the face of ostentatious designs like the Thermaltake Xazer. The front of the case has a flip-out panel which covers up the forward ports. Underneath the panel there are 2 USB slots, a Firewire port, and a couple of audio jacks. Unfortunately I found the placement - right at the very bottom of the front facia - a bother to use: getting a USB plug into the slot is an art worthy of a surgeon, and the fact that the panel is fastened at the bottom means that it is prone to coming off if the case is ever shuffled about. I would have much preferred for these ports to be at the top, but as this was really the biggest flaw I could see in the design it remains that the AC6607 is a superbly made product. An example of this is the side panels. The right hand side panel is locked in place with two thumb screws. Untwist these and then slide the two catches off and the panel comes away like a lid. What a pleasure this is in comparison to my old cases, which either involved removing the entire single-piece cover in an operation worthy of military command to panels that had to be slid all the way back. Getting access to my PC's innards is a quick and easy job now, and in tandem with the uncluttered layout inside, working on my PC when using the AC6607 case is as stress-free as I could hope for.

The inside of the case itself is sublime. The design just screams out class while there's a definite shout about the build quality, not forgetting a good cheer for the looks. The motherboard sits unobstructed by anything except maybe the bottom optical drive slot. There's plenty of room for the PSU, and I managed to attach my Coolermaster Aero 7 heatsink/fan - no wee beastie - without having to yank the PSU back out. Both of the disk drive cages can simply be released with a quick spin of a thumb screw or a press on a lever. The HD enclosure has little rubber grommets on all the screw-holes, minimising vibrations greatly. The optical drives only need to be screwed in on the near side and easily slide into their well shielded brackets. Everything is solid and perfectly aligned, so no extra noise will be generated from poor fits or built up resonance. The rear case fan sits right next to both the AGP slot and CPU zone, so when combined with the fan from the PSU there's a flurry of air circulation going on around the hottest part of the PC. The front fan is situated directly in front of the hard drive brackets. While this does disturb the airflow of clean air, especially if all four slots were occupied, it does also have the affect of moving warm air away from the drives and towards the back fan. Both fans just slot into their purple plastic brackets, which means no driving in of those petulant grub screws that normally perform this function. The card slots at the back require no screws as the little plates are held in without the need for extra restraint. All of this engineering comes at a price however. The case may not be well suited to carrying around a lot as it does weigh a heck of a lot and some black faceplate for the CD and floppy drives would retain the uniformity of colour of the facia, but these are minor quibbles for this reviewer.

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