Photos, The Case Interior
We’ve got some room here! We’ll look at the fans first, we have to start somewhere.
230mm continues to be large. That’s a 120mm fan next to it. Lots of cable management openings up there too, though they’re rather thin.
Looks like the man or machine that installed the PCIe slot covers was having a bad day. Thankfully the screw hole survived the experience.
There are two interesting things in this picture, one is the SATA pug to power the USB charging port, the other is the USB cable setup. Check it out:
YES! Someone with a brain was here! Both USB3 cables also have USB2 plugs on them. You’re covered regardless of what your motherboard supports plug wise.
Up till recently there haven’t been any boards with multiple USB3 ports that I was aware of, but I saw a picture of one (A Z77 board, I believe) with two, so there you go.
Stamped on the mobo tray is this nice guide to which standoffs need to be installed for each flavor of motherboard. To make installing the standoffs easier BitFenix included a tool:
Very cool, makes installing standoffs far, far easier than other methods. This is good as only two standoffs come installed. They both have raised inner bits that are supposed to hold the motherboard perfectly aligned. They didn’t fit in the screw holes of the motherboard I used, your mileage may (and hopefully will) vary.
This brings us to the drive bays:
The optical bays have an interesting tool-free mechanism. You push the center bit in and slide it (you can see one is pushed and slid) to latch the drive in place. Both sides have these latches. On the inside it looks like this:
The latches do a pretty good job, the drive can wiggle a little bit as with most tool-free setups, but it definitely isn’t going to go AWOL.
The HDD trays look like this:
On the sides are rubber grommets with metal pegs in them, other similar setups I have seen you put the drive in the tray, put the pegs in and then slide the drive. That does not work here, I’m not entirely certain how you’re supposed to do the install. I found it to be annoying at best. I was almost certainly Doing It Wrong. This setup does do a wonderful job of damping HDD noise. You can also see the four screw holes for attaching a 2.5″ drive (like a SSD), unlike most cases this will center the drive in the tray, nice!
Also involved in the drive bays is this 5.25″ (optical bay size) to 3.5″ external drive adaptor:
No tool-free mounting here, but that’s ok. It is nice and solid and matches the front of the case of course.
Accessory wise the pickings are somewhat slim:
You do get plenty of cable ties, five stick on cable routing doodads and a sack of screws. I’m spoiled by the individually bagged screws Thermaltake included in the last case I reviewed. You do get a speaker too, and it has hot glue protecting the under-speaker solderpoints. This sounds simple, but having had a couple of those points break off in the past I was very happy to see it.
