
Two 250mm fans are what drew me to this clean minimalist styled PC case and I have been thoroughly enjoying my time with this case on my main gaming rig. To start off, this is a full tower case and it is pretty standard for a case of its price range with 1 mm SECC steel with a polyurethane front panel kept closed with magnets. The black finish is nice and tough, and has held up to multiple encounters with me and my never ending fiddling with my system. It comes with five 5.25″ bays, two external 3.5″ bays, six internal 3.5 inch bays, and room for 7 expansion slots. The carriers for the hard drives are stand alone and can sit in the case even while not carrying a hard drive, but the 5.25inch carriers are snap on style only and must be stored when not in use. The front ports support USB 2.0 (a little dated), HD audio, and Firewire. The power supply mounts on the top, which I still prefer for heat removal, and wire routing, though I know many prefer bottom mounted systems. The fans and chassis have their own lighting and I will note this is not a case I would have in my bed room as the fan LEDs, which are very bright and cannot be disabled while the fans are running. Another drawback is that there are no water cooling cutouts, for those of us that love water cooling, but I had enough room to use my PCI tubing adapter bracket without any hiccups.
Installing a motherboard into this chassis is quite easy as there is plenty of room, and hard drives and optical drives do not require any tools as they all easily click into each of their drives. There is room to loop cables behind the case to try and clean it up a little. You will need to watch at where your SATA power and data cables end up, however, as you can get them nicking at the fan. However even with straight SATA data cables I was able to fit them and have no problems. I’m able to cram 7 hard drives comfortably (using one 5.25in adapter) in this case along with one optic drive, which brings me along to effective cooling. All my drives are stacked on top of each other and generate a lot of heat; however, temperatures remain quite stable even with the fans lugging away at their lowest speed. There is a ton of venting at the top of the case and you can feel the airflow on the lowest setting and when I’m playing games you can feel the hot air leaving the case. At the lowest setting there isn’t a noticeable change in ambient noise however when at full blast they do run towards the loud side; I would say they are at least as loud as my GTX 480 under Folding@home, if not louder. The thing about 250mm fans that is nice is it’s a much deeper sound and not as intrusive as a 92mm fan at full speed. Overall, just at minimum speed there is a few degree Celsius difference in northbridge and GPU temperatures vs no fans. At fans at full blast there is about a 10*C+ drop in idle and full load temperatures, however it does turn your PC into a little space heater.
It is a solid case with a clean design, and there is not much at fault with it, and I have not had any problems with it so far. There were concerns about fan life with such a heavy fan, but I have had this case since October 2011 and I use my computer quite a bit as you can imagine. I’m very happy with it and I feel it has a good value for those looking for no frills high airflow case.