X-bit labs

Four Mainstream Cases Reviewed: New Models in Middle Tower Class (page 12)

Category: Other

by Vasily Melnik

[ 08/07/2007 | 06:45 PM ]

The graphics card had to be bent so that we could attach the additional power:

The graphics card won’t last long with such a bend, and any shock suffered by the assembled system during transportation may prove fatal to it. Cooler Master made one mistake. System cases with such cages are usually made deeper by 3-5 centimeters to avoid this kind of collisions. The fact that they didn’t do so is indicative of a gross engineering error, which is not typical of the company. Anyway, this system case won’t suit for some hardware configurations. You have to look for a mainboard with a graphics card slot placed lower than on our mainboard or avoid top-end graphics cards with full-size PCBs.

There were no problems with the rest of the assembly procedure. It took mere seconds to install the optical drive:

There are no gaps between the panels. The only trouble is that there are no locks on one side and the drive wobbles a little when you press on the eject button. We installed our fan controller into the bottom bay:

It’s because we had some problems with laying out the thermal sensors’ signal cables due to the protruding HDD cage.

As for hard drives, you can install them after everything else is already in place. To do this, you should take the guide out of the cage…

…and remove the bar in its rear part:

Then you put your HDD into it and guide the HDD into the bay:

Like in servers, there are two LEDs on the cage:

One LED indicates the HDD’s activity and the other is a Power indicator. The indicators are in fact soldered on the PCB with the interface connectors and there are two light pipes in the right panel of the HDD guide.

The overall impression from this case is somewhat ambiguous. Its quality of manufacture is high. It’s got a handy HDD cage and a nice and calm exterior design. But there are design flaws in the chassis that may become a trouble for the user. You can put up with them if you want to assemble a PC in this system case and use it without constantly upgrading. You just have to be careful when selecting your mainboard and graphics card so that they fitted both together into this system case. The HDD cage is unique for this product class. Some people are going to be enticed into buying this product just for that cage alone.