Although the interior of the case is hidden from the world,
it's still quite important. When putting everything in to
the system we all notice two major things: accessibility
and, of course, any sharp edges. You'll be glad to hear
that this case was good in both categories. While it's nothing
too special with accesibility, we were very happy to see
a near complete lack of sharp edges.
Motherboard
installation was standard. Simply put the spacers into the
holes on the motherboard tray, place the motherboard on
top, and screw it in. As like any other case, this one includes
more than plenty of screws and washers for anything you
can imagine. Unfortunately, the motherboard tray is non-removable.
Having large hands, I did have a little trouble trying to
put the screw in the hole that is closest to the back of
the case, but it wasn't a big deal.
The power
supply was simple to install on this case. Rather than opening
the side panel and installing the power supply through the
case, you can just push it in from the outside. The back
has a removable cover that unscrews and then allows the
psu to slide in. After that all you have to do is screw
the cover back to the psu and case. This saved you the trouble
of trying to get it to fit through everything, and saves
you the worry that you might bump into something.
Installing
CD-Roms, floppys and hard drives was also quite standard.
All you do is pop the bay cover off, push it in, and turn
the screwdriver a few times. Those of you with raid setups
will definitely appreciate the case's ability to hold up
to five hard drives, although I'd leave it at three or four
to allow some breathing room. While the info said there
was a removable HDD bracket, there isn't. Four 5.25"
bays will also satisfy almost anyone's CD-Rom, DVD, and
burning needs. Also, although many people never use even
one, this case has room for two floppy drives.
Ah, more than plenty of room for everything.
Air-flow in
the back of the case is very good. Having two fans really
does help cool your processor much more, bringing my idle
load down four degrees Farenheit, all the way down to 78
degrees. Full load temperatures were also significantly
lower, 9 degrees actually.
Two fans are nice, especially if you cut those grills out and add customs.
The front
of the case is where we run into this case's biggest problem.
The front intake fan has literally nowhere to pull air in
from, the air holes that you can see on the front of the
case are actually below where the fan is mounted. Being
our creative selves, we did manage to partially fix this
problem. By lowering the fan about an inch and a half and
screwing it into the grill's slots we managed to get the
lower half of the fan to be directly over the holes on the
front of the case. While there still wasn't a normal amount
of airflow coming in, it did help.
As you can tell, about half
the fan is over the intake holes. So some air does come
in.
On the inside the LED and
misc connections that are on the front of the case take
up little room. The LEDs also appear to be easily changeable,
if you'd prefer to add different color.
Here you can see all of the wires and
screws that go along with the case.
