[section_title title=Closer Look – Interior and Installation]
Closer Look – Interior and Installation
Now it’s time for a look at the innards of this chassis.  As we can see, the case consists primarily the motherboard tray and then the dual hard drive trays. Interestingly, Aerocool have not gone with a larger stack of hard drive cages and I can only assume this is to allowed maximum airflow from the front intake fan. In the middle of the motherboard tray there is a small CPU cutout, or at least that is what I assume it is, as it would be near impossible to use due to it’s size and position, maybe a cable management hole. There is another two cable management holes to the right of it. I would prefer to see a little more cable management, as later on you’ll see I had a few issues. To the right of the motherboard tray is the dual HDD tray, which you will notice is attached to the motherboard tray by screws. This allows the HDD tray to be removed totally to open up a large space, I will say, though there are not many pictures, I did water cool the R9 290 in this chassis using a 240mm radiator in the roof and a 200mm in the front, so being able to remove the HDD tray for water cooling was essential, kudos to Aerocool there.
A brief look at the rear of the case again shows us what you saw in the exterior show. I would like to point out that both the exhaust fan, pictured here and the front intake fan can either run off the 3 pin fan header or the molex. However, if you run them off the molex, they will be on 12v and do become a little noisy.
A quick look at the front essentially shows what we saw from outside, you also get a better look at the screws fastening the HDD rack to the motherboard tray and the cable management.
Remember when we had a quick look at the rear of the case I spoke about the meshed area next to the power supply which was ventilation for an SSD mount, well this is the mount. There is space there for dual drives using the little rubber adapters that Aerocool provide. In my case, this was very useful as I use a 120gb SSD boot drive and a 500gb Western Digital Caviar Black laptop drive, so both can fit here and then the front can be removed for water cooling purposes.
Moving around to the window side of the case, you get a better idea of the cable routing issues here. As the Antec power supply is practically touching the cage, the cables were needed to be fed through the ventilation holes and into the HDD rack. This then meant that there where only two ways that they could be routed. Hence why the the cables are coming out of the HDD rack in the image below. Most of the IO cables I manage to route around the exterior of the case or under the motherboard itself. You will also notice that I had to remove the 3.5 inch FDD bay as it was stopping the graphics card power supply being plugged in.
Now that you know what my thoughts are to the exterior and interior of this chassis, let’s see how its real world performance stacks up to the competition. In our graphs it is mainly competing with the BitFenix Prodigy and the Phenom offerings.
