Building With The Antec Sonata IV
The finished Sonata IV looks pretty good for a steel-and-plastic model, even though we did not apply the one-inch-square logo sticker to the appropriate place on its door (designed to hold standardized builder logos of yesteryear).
Getting to this point was fairly easy with a support kit that consists mainly of screws. Antec also adds a 3.5” bay adapter, power cord, cable ties, and door panel keys.
Optical drive rails are stored inside the cover of each bay, preventing loss. The rails make it easy to remove and reinstall drives, but they still require four screws.
Note that each rail has several holes at the center and a slot at the rear. The below rail alignment provides a flush fit between the optical drive’s face and the case panel’s face.
Antec includes four M3-0.50 thumb screws for attaching a 2.5” drive directly to the side of the 3.5” drive cage. While that part of the build worked fine, it was impossible to attach cables to the drive. This is because the folded edge of the drive cage protrudes directly into the path of the cable, directly beneath the end of its connector. We left our 2.5" SSD attached for looks, without cables, during testing.
Also notice in the above photo that the 3.5” drive bay rails are already screwed into their bays. Removing the thumb screws allows these to be attached to the drive via shoulder screws, which are also factory-installed within silicon grommets to dampen vibrations.
The optical drive slides into its bay until a “click” is heard from its latches, and the hard drive rails slide back into place with the hard drive attached. From there, we simply followed the steps outlined in our How To Build A PC guide.
One thing not covered in our how-to guide is the installation of the USB 3.0 pass-through cable, which connects to the motherboard’s I/O plate. We’re certain that anyone who has come this far knows how to plug in a USB cable.
Also notice that we changed power supplies from Antec’s included unit. Today’s heat and noise results demand that we use the same power supply in every build, so we decided to grab our latest standardized part.
