let me say I have a 400sc and im not exactly thrilled about it, the cons that apply to it also do the sc420
- this case looks close to atx size ITS NOT there is hardly any room inside, the 3.5 drive bays sit ABOVE the motherboard like 1/2" well into the motherboard
- if you want to upgrade the psu be prepaired to cut sheetmetal for the power button, dells psu's dont have power buttons, and to be super creative with zip tyes for an hour trying to find a place to put a normal psu's wires, dells psu's have extra short lenght designed for the setup
- upgrading to rounded cables be prepaired to cut off the boots on the cables and to do some creative routing with them
- if you live in a hot area and/or add lots of upgrades be prepaired for heat issues, there is NO cpu fan, there is a shroud that partly covers the heatsink and the rear fan draws air from the heatsink area out the back, its thermal control fan but it kicks in very high temps near where the cpu will throttle to prevent overheating, ive seen 60C+ on it
- the plastic rattles on the metal, youll find yourself often pushing on the plastic to stop rattle
- the 90mm fans mounted with ruber, I messed with it and I couldnt see how you could remove it without breaking the rubber
- the motherboard mount is proprietary, youll never be moving the motherboard to anther case vise/versa
- you need to be extreamly picky about memory, "overclocking" memory will not work, there is no memory adjustments in the bios, many people bought ocz, hyperx, muskin ect.. memory for the 400sc and were not able to get it to work, need case2.5, this has allways been dells policy with all there pcs, a safe bet is crucial memory though
- benchmarks: it will pretty much be the slowest motherboard you can get with that chipset
- dell does not support win xp for these, though with research you can find drivers
Pluses:
- STABILITY, STABILITY, STABILITY, STABILITY, STABILITY!!!!!!!
not one crash EVER or any sorts of errors runing 24/7 for little over a year (reboots for software updates)
Note: do not try to put a high end graphics card in this and expect the psu to last or work, its a very very good psu, but high end graphics cards use as much power as
cpus do now