Inside the belly of the beast
The inside of the Sonata III is concerned with functionality not fancy stuff. It's rather bare, with little in the way of luxuries.
Beneath the five externally-accessible drive bays are four internal 3.5in HDD bays. They're mounted at 90 degrees to the front of the chassis, for easy access and each comes with its own removable drive-tray.
The four HDD trays come pre-fitted with rubber grommets but they didn't seem to make much impact on dampening hard disk noise - it was easily audible from outside of the chassis.
Oh and on the subject of noise - remember we spoke about the absent front fan? Well, perhaps that goes some way to explaining the ‘quiet PC’ moniker that the Sonata III 500 carries.
On the up side, the lone 120mm fan that is fitted - at the rear - is one of Antec's impressive tri-cool units. However, it's powered via a Molex connector, making it a little harder to keep the interior tidy.
The fitted power supply is a 500W unit (hence the 500 name-tag), and that's a 50W improvement over the PSU fitted to the Sonata II. The PSU boldly displays an 80+ performance efficiency sticker and is a member of Antec's EarthWatts range.
It was quiet in use and, since it comes fitted as standard, we left it in place for our thermal tests.