by Ivan Pritula
07/14/2003 | 10:33 PM
There is the whole lot of PC cases in the market: big and small, simple and extraordinary, classical and modding-friendly. An unsophisticated user will definitely lose his way in this abundance. However, it is very important to choose a proper case for your system. All hardware components of your computer get replaced once a year on average, but the case is probably the only thing that stays unchanged much longer. That is why, if you buy a PC case, which you will not like any more after a while, then you will have to pay for this light-minded decision for a long time. The notorious case will be an eyesore to you not a year and maybe not even two, but much longer. Moreover, low-quality case may cause moral and even physical injuries. You can cut your fingers when assembling a system in a bad case, and low-quality power supply unit may ruin your system’s stability, so that you will lay yourselves out for a long time trying to figure out what’s the matter.
Far-sighted PC case designers and manufacturers spend huge sums of money on the new designs taking into account the airflow inside the case, the convenient and easy access to the system components during assembly, and in most cases their efforts pay back well.
So, our verdict is: choosing a proper case for your needs is a serious and responsible task. Today, we are going to tell you about a very stylish and very smartly designed PC case - Chenbro Gaming Bomb aka Xpider in the US market.
The considered Chenbro Gaming Bomb PC case feature PC61166 model number. Its specifications look as follows:
We can’t help pointing out very unusual external case design boasting perfect style, excellent contrasts and attractive colors. The basic part of the case as well as its sides are colored matt black. The front panel stands out due to its stylish shape and contrasting black and dark-red colors. All 5-inch lids covering the bays are oval-shaped with a small cavity in the middle. The lower part of the front panel looks as if it were webbed by an unknown spider, which is very unusual and attractive, I should say. The sliver-glimmering panel with the manufacturer’s logo and the Power button of the same design stand out very nicely on the front panel.
Take note that Chenbro Company produces its Gaming Bomb (Xpider) in several other colors, where all the orange plastic components are replaced with the plastic components of other colors. The current product range includes blue, green and gray models.
Of course, we should definitely say a few words about a window in one of the case sides. Many case developers do not pay due attention to side windows and usually make them of traditional rectangular shape. Of course, a solution like that will not be able to satisfy the tastes of an advanced user, dedicated gamer or modding fan.
A window in the case is one of the major modder’s tricks. The PC cases with windows are especially popular today. If the users had to cut out the case window themselves some time ago and any sort of window was a real wonder, now you will hardly surprise anyone with it. The cases with side windows were equipped with neon lamps and lighting coolers, so that the systems really looked very beautiful and impressive. But that’s what the things used to be.
Now any modder or just a PC user with artistic desires can find a very stylish-looking case. Cases with transparent plastic windows on the sides and neon lighting inside are already produced in mass quantities, so that you will have no problems fining a case with a window like that. However, this is just the first impression. Some manufacturers do not care that much about the shape and design of this window, so if you really want to please your taste, you will have to do a bit of searching. Even today, you can very frequently come across devil-may-care attitude towards the implementation of such a great idea as a window in the PC case: there may be sharp edges, and the plexiglas window may be even fastened with very ugly screws, which spoil the whole picture. You should also always check the quality of the plexiglas used for this window, because it may be scratched , so that the whole thing looks even worse than you could imagine. Sometimes, the situation is just the opposite: the manufacturer cares a lot about the window, but tries to save on the case, so that the material of the case leaves much to be desired.
Speaking about Chenbro Gaming Bomb we should say that the window, this vitally urgent attribute of a modder’s case, has been very thoroughly designed and implemented. The Gaming Bomb window consists of two parts: the first one is shaped as the letter “B”, which probably comes from the “Bomb” word in the name. The second part looks like a boomerang flying around this B-letter. If you install a neon lamp inside the case, it will look very impressive in the dark:
Unfortunately, there are no neon lamps supplied together with this case. However, this unit is shipped with an additional 800mm fan fastened to the case rear panel right under the power supply unit. This fan also looks very beautiful in the dark, because there are four LEDs in it, which emit blue and orange light during operation. This cooler amazed me a lot when I installed ultra-violet lighting:
As we see, a pair of neon lamps and shining fans are more than enough to make Chenbro Gaming Bomb case impress your friends, and even suit for a Lan Party :)
All in all, Chenbro Micom managed to make a very stylish modder’s case, which will definitely become very popular among many users.
However, there is one thing you should keep in mind when you will be buying Chenbro Gaming Bomb case. The front panel of this case is not covered with any doors. The manufacturer offers no means to hide the front panels of the 5-inch devices installed into the bays, that is why when you install the regular optical drives and the like, you will be disappointed with the way their light-gray panels look against the colorful Chenbro case background. Therefore, I would advise to make sure that you have optical drives with black front panels, which are not a rare thing, although they are not very widely spread in the today’s market. in this case your system assembled in the beautiful Chenbro case will never lose style.
The functionality of this case also deserves our applause. First of all, I have to say that this PC case successfully stood the compatibility tests for the High-End Pentium 4 platforms and dual-processor Athlon MP platforms. Systems like that require much more from the case and PSU that is why if you have a Chenbro Gaming Bomb case there is no need to worry about overheating.
Also we can’t help mentioning that you can handle the case almost without any screwdriver. You don’t need a screwdriver to remove the side panel - you should just turn a special key (yes, the case is locked with a key, so that your enemies couldn’t steal the CPU) and pull up a small handle. You can also install all expansion card without any screwdriver (there are special small clips fastening the cards: you should just close them and then turn to the side to fix the card). The front panel can also be removed without any additional tools.
The floppy drives and CD-ROM drives are installed with the help of special slides, which are initially placed into a special holding mechanism at the bottom of the case. Frankly speaking, this is a very convenient way to fasten these devices: at first you fasten the slides onto the floppy or any other drive (small plastic pins of the slides fit into the fastening holes on the drive package), and then the entire construction goes into the chassis. You should only remove the front panel before installing the drive (to do it you should turn two plastic handles). After that you return the front panel back and it covers the drive edges, so that it looks smooth and ergonomic, fitting pretty well into the case design.
Note that al the slides are marked, so you will never mix up the slides for the floppy with those for a CD-ROM drive, for instance.
For hard disk drives installation they suggest using the same construction as in INWIN cases: there is a special removable chassis, which is fastened with the help of one single thumbscrew.
On the front panel there are the following connectors: 2 USB 2.0 ports, 1 FireWire port, audio-In and audio-Out. These connectors are hidden under a small cover, which you should simply raise to find the connectors.
Behind the net on the front panel there is a dust filter, which protects the insides of the case against dust. A smart solution, no doubt.
The case is made of pretty thick metal. Together with a quite heavy power supply unit, this heavy case absorbs the vibrations and reduces the noise. The cheap cases are usually made of thin metal with unpolished edges. In our Chenbro Gaming Bomb case all edges are very well polished and your fingers will be safe and sound: it is simply impossible to cut them!
Low-quality PC cases very often have one more problem: the installed CD-ROM drive gets pressed to the mainboard. The Chenbro case eliminates this problem completely: no matter how big the mainboard is (reasonably big, of course), the drive will be above it. Also sometimes you do not have enough space for the second HDD or a CD-RW drive. With the Chenbro Gaming Bomb you will forget about this trouble: there are four 5-inch bays, one external 3-inch bay and 4 internal 3-inch bays in it.
The fan blowing the air outside can be of various sizes: 80mm, 92mm and 120mm. The default fan is an 80x80mm one. One of the indisputable advantages of this case is very smart cooling scheme, when the airflow from the case fan and PSU fan goes directly to the CPU cooler.
We would also like to point out that with a system assembled in Chenbro Gaming Bomb case you can easily access all internal components unlike cheap Chinese cases, even though the mainboard is fastened permanently.
And now I have to say a few words about the revealed drawbacks. First of all, I was very upset to find no Reset button on the case. Sometimes, when the system freezes and doesn’t react to Ctrl+Alt+Del combination, the Reset button is very helpful. This will first of all disappoint overclocking fans, who use this button very often trying to squeeze the maximum performance out of their systems.
I also wish we could remove the right and the top panels of the case. Now when we need to install the had drive, we have to remove the chassis, to fasten the HDD and then to put the chassis back into the case. If we could remove the right side of the case, things could be much easier. By the way, HDDs (and also the mainboard) are the only components, which should be fastened with the help of the screws. In fact, this is quite logical, as the hard disk drives need reliable fastening, so we wouldn’t trust plastic clips here.
The panel where the mainboard sits cannot be removed from the case, that is why it is not always convenient to install the board and the processor cooler. However, as we have already said, Chenbro Gaming Bomb case is very big and there is enough room inside even for a non-removable mainboard base: you will be able to replace the CPU or memory modules without any problems.
One more drawback in my point of view, is the length of the ATX power supply cables. These cables are a way too long that is why the heap of cables in the case may sometimes hinder proper airflow. Unfortunately, the manufacturer doesn’t supply any buckles, which could be very helpful.
The last drawback of Chenbro Gaming Bomb case we would like to mention is the non-removable dust filter. That is why if one day you decide to clean it, you will have to remove and clean the entire front panel of the case.
This case is equipped with the 350W FSP Group power supply unit known as PowerMan or Forton. The PSUs from this company have always been known for their high quality functioning and low noise level. All their components are always equipped with large heatsinks, which definitely affected the PSU efficiency as well as its weight.
This time FSP Group again proved up to our expectations. Instead of the regular 80mm fan inside the power supply unit, there is a 120mm fan inside the PSU, placed closer to the lower side of it. This fan should not only produce less noise, but is supposed to improve processor cooling and internal air circulation. Of course, due to this fan Chenbro Gaming Bomb produces very low noise: only 37dBA with the open case. The thing is that this 120mm fan is very quiet by itself, but the brand name Noise Killer technology from FSP Group the resulting noise level is impressively low.
This power supply unit is more than enough for any contemporary system based on Athlon XP or Pentium 4, equipped with a powerful graphics accelerator like RADEON 9800/9700 or the top NVIDIA GeForce FX model. Moreover, it has enough power for the future solutions, too. Of course, the PSU supports ATX12V standard required by almost all mainboards for Intel Pentium 4 and the upcoming AMD Athlon 64.
For our practical tests we assembled the following system in the Chenbro Gaming Bomb case:
All this equipment warms up the air inside the case very tangibly, so we will be able to evaluate objectively the temperature inside the tested PC case. We measured the temperature and noise level with the open and closed side panel of the case. In the first case we could evaluate how efficient the air circulation inside the case is, and in the second case – how well the case absorbs noises produced by internal fans. We warmed up the system by running 3DMark2001 SE for two hours. The tests were run with the following settings:
These settings warm up the CPU and the graphics card well enough. After the temperature was measured, the PC “cooled down” for 30 minutes in idle mode.
The results are given in the table below:
CPU Temperature, oÑ | System Temperature, oC | Noise, db | |
Open case | 46 | 38 | 60 |
Closed case | 52 | 42 | 52 |
The low processor temperature can be explained by the presence of the second fan by the PSU, which is located exactly above the processor cooler. The air inside the system case circulates very well, as we see from the low temperature values, although the components heat up a real lot there. However, as for the noise level, the results are no that impressive: 52dB against 60dB. Well, sometimes we saw much better results, honestly.
The voltages generated by the PSU lie within the normal interval: no dangerous deviations have been detected:
+5V | 4.80V |
+12V | 12.16V |
-12V | -12.30V |
-5V | -5.20V |
VCore (1,85V) | 1.85V |
Well, we have come to an end with our tests of Chenbro Gaming Bomb case. We have every reason to state that Chenbro Gaming Bomb is a really very good, nicely designed PC case. No doubt that engineers and designed worked on this product very seriously. As a result, the case boasts excellent design and rich functionality, which is a very rare thing today. Of course, it is not free from some drawbacks, such as the absence of Reset button, for instance, however, it is impossible to make an ideal case, especially for the money the manufacturer asks for its creature: Chenbro Gaming Bomb is a really inexpensive product. On our part, we would like to strongly recommend this PC case to al users who are looking for a stylish and reliable system case.