Case Interior

Looking inside the case, you begin to understand why the case is so heavy. Utilizing heavy gauge steel construction throughout, this case is as solid as a tank. Another welcome addition is that all the edges are either milled or rolled so you don't end up bleeding all over the place when building a system.

The external and internal drive capacities of this case are immense, and far beyond the needs of most users. Five external 5.5" bays, and eight 3.5" bays, two of which are external. With this number of drive bays, there is all the drive and component expansion space anyone would need. All of the drive bays are tool-less as well, and with the provided drive rails for each area, installing drives is an absolute breeze. The hard drive mounting area has the drives facing outward similar to many modern designs, which makes swapping drives in an out of the case quite easy. However, when choosing a power supply for a case like this, you will need a power supply with a longer than typical D-shell or SATA power connection leads in order to ensure a clean wiring job.

The rear shelf for the power supply is sturdy and should be able to support the heaviest of power supplies, even dual mini redundant supplies which are quite long and heavy. The rear PSU mounting plate is removable just for this reason as some server class PSU's would require a different bolt pattern than a desktop PSU or may need to be "flipped".

The cabling for top panel switches and lights, USB, HD Audio, and eSATA are all well shielded and more than long enough to deal with most any cable routing issues. The HD audio cable also has separate pin-outs should your motherboard not have a standard HD audio block header.

Pulling off the front bezel is quite easy, after you depress three plastic latches on the inside front of the tower. Looking at all of the external drive bays and the fan inlet from this side, you'll notice that each of these areas features it's own little piece of of mesh filter material, which can be easily removed and cleaned.

Looking at the bare front of the chassis, you will notice there are lots and lots of holes to insure adequate ventilation. Towards the bottom of the front of the chassis, you'll also notice the mount for the 12cm fan. Although the fan itself is mounted to this blue plastic shield with screws, the actual assembly itself is removable for ease of cleaning.

Well, that covers everything worth seeing. So what do we think? Read on...