A Closer Look: Interior
So this is how the Strike-X Xtreme looks when opened. You can clearly see there are four 5.25″ drive bays, and five hard drive bays. But I will talk about that in detail later.
Here you can see the motherboard mounting space with a large cutout for a CPU cooler mounting bracket; so you can easily change or remove the CPU cooler without removing the whole motherboard. Another great thing I really like to see in cases are the cable management holes; and if there are rubber grommets it is even better. I do like clean looks, so with the cable management holes you can reroute all the ugly and tangled cables behind the motherboard tray. This is first better for the airflow, second it just looks better and third you can remove cables more easily the first seeking then untangling and then removing them. As much I love cable management holes In this case the are rather on the small size. The lowest hole next to the PSU is the largest of all but there need to pass many cables and I doubt you can reroute all cables through it. Especially when you have a non-modular PSU. Then next to the motherboard I also doubt the is room enough to pass multiple PCIe power cables if you have a setup with more then one VGA card.
Here on the backside of the motherboard tray, you can see the cable management holes and a tie-off location where you can attach a zip tie to and bind some cables together to get a cleaner look and use less space. There are multiple tie-off locations located on the backside of the tray.
Here you can see that the 5.25″ drive bays have a tool-less design, which is something I really like. To install an optical drive, just turn the knobs until the plate comes off on both sides, slide in the drive and put the plates back on. So done.
Here you can see the 5.25″ to 3.5″ adapter, I find it great that Aerocool included this with the case. It comes in handy to have if you want to install, for example, a card reader because most of them come in 3.5″ formats.
Here we see the five hard drive slots, this is special cause you need to install them from the backside of the case. In most case you install the hard drives from the other side where you install the motherboard and such. Unfortunately this is not a completely tool-less design as you still need to secure the drives with screws.
The Strike-X is equipped with seven PCI expansion slots, so a configuration with two or even three graphics cards would be no problem. That is if you can remove the PCI brackets… I do have the feeling the brackets are soldered to the chassis itself and I do hope its just with my model cause its almost impossible to remove the brackets without bending or even breaking them.
