Case ?: Do most have a "sleep" vs. "on" indicator?

[bluescreen]

I'm thinking of building my own i7 system after experiencing three faulty machines in a row from HP. You can read the whole sorry saga here if you're curious, or check out this video on YouTube. The short version of that story is to avoid HP's home i7-based systems -- they can't reliably build one that works.

One feature I liked from that e9180t system, however, was that the power switch lit up white when the machine was on, and turned orange when the system was asleep. The switch was dark when the power was turned all the way off. How can I find that feature on a homebuilt PC case? I tried looking at specs on Newegg, as well as looking in a manual or two, but I haven't found any references to a feature like this.

If no one sells a case that does this out of the box, would it be easy to wire up something myself?

Thanks in advance!

 

[wathman]

This is more a feature of the motherboard than it is the case. If the board supports something like this then it would be little trouble to rig up something similar. Pretty much every laptop I ever owned does this however... since there are some i7 based laptops out there now, have you considered going that route? It's true that desktop systems still out perform similarly classed laptops, but overall the price premium for going mobile has become almost become insignificant, given the advantages a laptop has.

 

[bluescreen]

I am thinking of buying a laptop too, but I want a desktop to be able to throw a lot of disks into it, and to offer better performance.

I realize that the motherboard would have to support sleep mode, and I thought that most did. I just don't see where the case would indicate sleep vs. on vs. off. Do most cases have a dual-color LED for the power light? That's apparently what HP did in their system.

 

[wathman]

All desktops will be able to go into sleep mode, the thing about having a header for an LED to indicate it is sleeping is the feature I really haven't seen in desktops.

dual color LEDs in cases I've seen have been used to do stuff like solid blue for power, and blink red for HDD activity. one of my rebuilt systems I own now I used a cheap Auzentech or something case that had this LED layout. Theoretically you could connect the LED headers to whatever the motherboard outputs, so if you find one that does the sleep indicator, it should work.

 

[bluescreen]

Well, after some more digging, I've found out that motherboards support sleep indication differently. The ASUS P6T SE's manual states:

* System power LED (2-pin PLED)
This 2-pin connector is for the system power LED. Connect the chassis power LED cable to this connector. The system power LED lights up when you turn on the system power, and blinks when the system is in sleep mode.

The Intel DX58SO (http://downloadmirror.intel.com/18128/eng/DX58SO_ProductGuide01_English.pdf) manual states:

If the computer has a dual-colored power LED on the front panel, the sleep state is indicated by the LED turning amber. When signaled by a wake-up device or event, the computer quickly returns to its last known awake state.

It looks like I should be able to figure out what the motherboard supports by reading the manuals. I'll have to read the case manuals to see if any of the ones I'm considering have a dual-color power LED. It looks like I should be able to drop back to just having a blinking LED if I have to, but it's not clear what the Intel board will do if I have a mono-color LED. It may not blink the 'green' LED line, since it has a separate 'amber' LED connection.

Thanks for your help. It looks like the information is out there, but just not easily available.