X-bit labs

Workstation Cases Roundup: Best Power Characteristics, Best Cooling, Best Design! (page 4)

Category: Other

by Yury Vayukin

[ 01/14/2005 | 04:27 PM ]

Chieftec DX-01WD-U

The second case from Chieftec reviewed here has a different design as well as internals. This model comes in eight colors: white, red, yellow, violet, black, green, blue and silver.

There are four bays for optical drives and two bays for floppy drives, and power and reset buttons hidden under the lockable door on the front panel. Like with the previous model, the power and HDD indicators are visible through the plastic light pipes even when the door is shut. Beneath the door, there is a closable window with two USB ports and one 6-pin FireWire connector. Unfortunately, the manufacturer didn’t bother about making this section nobler visually – when you open the window, you can see a PCB with the connectors soldered up. Moreover, this contraption is attached to the plastic grid and this whole unit bends when you plug in a connector (for example, a flash drive).

The brackets of the 5.25” bays have an ordinary shape, but the front panel itself has grooves for your fingers – for an easier extraction of the brackets as well as for an easier access to the clips of the rails that are used to mount optical drives. Under the plastic brackets of external bays there are metal brackets that you should remove with a screwdriver.

The side panels are taken off in a similar way as with the CX-01 model: the left is locked with a key and equipped with a plastic handle. The right panel is held by screws.

The DX-01WD-U differs from the above-described model inside: all 3.5” devices are fastened with screws to the two baskets that are fixed on their places with metal clips.

The manufacturer seems to have intended to provide a screw-based fixing of the baskets: there are two holes in the side panels of the baskets and their slides, but the holes are not threaded. Both baskets have seats for plastic cells of fans, but the cell itself is in the bottom basket only since a fan cell in the top basket would make it impossible to install external devices. Among special features of this design is the impossibility to remove or install the bottom basket when it’s filled with hard disk drives if the graphics card is already plugged into the mainboard.