I'm gonna take a wild guess here and say several of our readers here have jobs. To further display my psychic prowess, I'm going to speculate that several people who read our site are either married or living with someone of the fairer sex. I'm sure it's a great arrangement compared to the bachelor life. Having to use clean dishes, put on clean clothes and take out the trash instead of just throwing it in the garage is probably beneficial to your longterm health somehow. However, there's one end of the deal where we gamers always get shafted. Like Sway said in his recent comments, the PC always pulls the short straw in the furniture arrangements. Inevitably the PC is quarantined to one tiny room or worse, maybe the corner of some attic where no one can hear you scream and you're susceptible to almost anything.

Well never fear because I'm here to help a gamer out. You see, what's the major reason you're confined to the darkest most remote depths of the house? It's not the glazed over look in your eyes or even your poor fashion sense because they just have to learn to live with that. No it's the fact that computers by and large are either ugly beige bastions of 1970's design or overpriced fruit-colored elitist boxes that require you to sit around drinking coffee in a black turtleneck and beret while using them. Also, they don't play games! Oh yeah, I went there. Fortunately the PC has been getting a facelift of late, with newer prettier boxes coming in every day. One of the latest is the Ahanix Dbox. Read on for more.

Now I don't want to give you the wrong idea. The Dbox isn't just a pretty face, there're some brains in there too. The Dbox rather proudly proclaims on the packaging and the website, Â"The worldÂ's first PC case with an Integrated Circuit BoardÂ". This means there's a little more to this case than a nice shell to stick your parts in.

For starters, it comes with 3 built in temperature sensors that can be hooked up to your CPU, Hard Disk and even Video Card. These temperature sensors display on the front of the case in a nice looking LED and you can switch between them with the Â"SelectÂ" button. It's nice to know when your CPU is getting overheated, especially when combined with the option of selecting your fan speed.

The case has 10 fan speeds which are controlled by the Â"UpÂ" and Â"DownÂ" buttons on the front of the case. Why on earth would you want to do that you ask? It's pretty simple really, when I'm just web browsing or listening to music my computer isn't generating much heat. I can turn the fans down, leaving me with a quiet case. That's using an old cheap power supply and stock CPU fan to boot. With a Â"silentÂ" power supply and CPU fan the selectable fan speed would leave your computer almost completely inaudible most of the time. It's definitely a welcome feature for people like me who would like to have a silent case. It also helps you negotiate for that prime house real estate when the PC doesn't make that much noise.

The ICB also allows the Dbox to automatically shut off when the computer gets too hot. At 70 degrees Celsius the case shuts down the system and restarts it when it cools down to 65 degrees Celsius. This is a nice feature in case the CPU fan goes bad or your air conditioner goes out. It keeps your computer from frying itself. Though it is a little redundant as most modern motherboards have this feature as well.

The fancy ICB isn't the only good feature of this case. It's a roomy case compared to my old one, which I fondly refer to as Â"old cheapieÂ". There was plenty of room to maneuver and install all my equipment. The only problem I ran into was that my Geforce 4 Ti4400 was awfully close to my hard drive, though my hard drive is sticking out quite a bit more than it probably should. There are very few sharp edges in the case, as they've all been thoughtfully rounded off. The rear PCI slot covers are replaceable and require no screws, which means no more fighting with pliers or screwdrivers trying to install a sound card. Just snap out the cover and snap in the card. The drive cages where you install the hard drive and CD drives are not removable, however. Installing my hardware was criminally easy in this case, no fighting to get the motherboard or RAM in, it all just fit.

The little extras are nice as well. They give you enough screws and washers to build a miniature metal horse made of tiny screws, if you want. Throw in a couple of extra CD drive face plates and rear slot covers and you've got everything you need. The Dbox has most of the basics covered, though strangely it didn't come with a power supply.

The case supports Flex, Micro and Full ATX motherboards. It also sports front USB and IrDA connectors. It has filters on all the air intakes, which is nice because every PC I've ever owned attracts dust inside the case like a Mac at a Lan party (Oh! I went there twice!). It also has EMI protective shielding to protect your speakers and other sensitive electronic equipment from interference by your PC - the Illuminati can no longer see your porn collection.

Aesthetically the case looks much better than a plain beige box. I have the Â"Sony BlueÂ" version of the case but it comes in 8 colors, Black, Silver, Sony Blue, Lavender, Green, Red, Slever (C-LX121GW, I have no idea either.) and Yellow. The CD face plate covers help give the entire case a unified look and they work with any CD drive. The blue light on the top of the case acts as the power light. Not only does it blend in nicely with the rest of the case, but it makes it very easy to tell whether or not your computer is on. My only real gripe aesthetically is the color of the LCD, it should change based on the color of the case. The red LCD really clashes with the Gray/Blue color scheme of the rest of the case. The button layout is pretty eye-catching while still being useful. Of course as far as aesthetics goes, you'll just have to look at the pictures and make a decision for yourself. However it's my opinion that the case easily fits in a living room or den setting.

The Dbox User's Manual gives some nice documentation for how the case works, what wires go where, what the lights mean, etc. It's rather thorough for what it does and it gives you all the information you need. Definitely a lot more documentation than most cases provide. That is to say it actually exists. One thing to note is that the user's manual in the case doesn't have those nice color pictures the website has.

All of these features are great and the case is built well, but what's the catch? Well there are several problems I have with the case. My main gripe is a big deal if you live in the US. Notice how the LCD is showing the temperature in Celsius? Well you'd better get used to the metric system if you're looking at buying this case as there's no way to change it. None. I even went so far as to open the case and look at the ICB, there's a jumper that says Â"C/F switchÂ". Guess what? It doesn't do anything. I asked Ahanix support about this and they promptly replied there was no way to get the LCD to show temperature in Fahrenheit. For a case that they went through the trouble of installing an ICB in they sure forgot something pretty simple. In fact, that's why it annoys me so. It's so simple to add a Celsius to Fahrenheit converter to the ICB it's just plain negligent to not have one.

There were a few smaller issues that bother me, such as the front IrDA port not being connected to anything and falling off while I was moving the case. I'm not even sure it's an IrDA port, it could be a piece of plastic for all I know. My first temperature sensor went out, displaying the cryptic Â"Err0Â" whenever it's selected, which brings up another minor problem. None of the error messages are documented. This makes troubleshooting much harder than it needs to be.

In the end it's an aesthetically pleasing, well built case that has some very useful features. My only real gripes with the case are really rather small, but build up to what feels like a lack of polish. I hate to sound like I'm reviewing a game here but a Dbox v1.1 that fixed a lot of the little annoying problems I have would make the case perfect. As it stands it's a great case, and at $55 shipped from Newegg.com it's definitely got value. If you're in the market for a new case, I'd make sure to take a look at this one.

Pyroman[FO]