[section_title title=Closer Look – Interior and Installation]
Closer Look – Interior and Installation
As you can see on inside there is a massive amount of space to work with, even a quad-GPU system would look small in this chassis. However, there are a few issues that I need to point out. Firstly is the 24pin power cable and the grommets to supply it. With both the Fractal Design and Antec power supplies that I used for the chassis reviews, it was not possible to route the 24pin power through the grommets, as the grommet to feed the cable to the 24pin power was too far away. The same could be said of the 8pin CPU power. No matter which power supply I used, none of the 8pin CPU power cables were long enough. They were not even long enough if I tucked them behind the motherboard itself. The main issue I have with this is that surely Antec could see that there were going to be issues in this area and supply some extension cables as a solution for those of us that are going to run into issues in this area, and issue that is compounded if you are going to use the bottom power supply mount. The hard drive cages themselves are well thought out, with their tool less clip in design. They also come with screw holes for both 2.5 inch SSD’s and 3.5 inch HDD’s, with the latter having red rubber vibration dampers. As I touched on earlier with the case, the whole thing is riveted together. Whilst there is the spacing for the 240mm radiator in the front. I am afraid that you are going to need to drill out lots of rivets, mainly to lose the hard drive cages and the optical bays, to access it. Is it really worth the hassle on such a large and expensive case? In short, No.
Moving down the the bottom compartment of the chassis, we can see the bottom panel is secured by three small clips which slot into the bottom of the chassis. The two cutouts at the top of the panel then clip into the support bar on a spring loaded slide to hold the panel in place. However, as I have found, if you move the chassis ever so slightly these door drop open, so as you can imagine, it is extremely irritating. In the bottom of the chassis we can see that there is a removable, dust filtered intake for the power supply mount, as well as six hard drive cages which are of the same design as those in the main compartment of the chassis. You can also see on the panel that there is some sound deadening material, which is of a good thickness and quality.
First off, let me apologise for the dust, these fans have been used in another system for a little while now, to the naked eye, it is not as bad as the photo. Here we get a look at the internal 120mm fan mounts which are part of the hard drive cage. They are totally tool-less with a pin in each corner of the fan to help hold it square and then two clips, which can be seen in the photo, hold the fans securely in place. In general use, I found that using these fans helped to keep the graphics card temperatures down significantly. If you are planning to populate most of the hard drive cage, then I would suggest that you install some fans in these positions.
A quick look at the back of the motherboard tray shows that Antec have given a good amount of space for cable management, about 25mm and have provided some ties for users in key areas to allow for good cable management. The one thing that I will say needs to be improved, and is illustrated well in the photo, is the need for some extension cables to be supplied. Whilst the 8pin CPU power on this Fractal Design power supply is a good length, it still gets nowhere near reaching the 8pin motherboard socket. As you can see I have had to use an extension here for it and if I wanted to route the 24pin cables behind the motherboard tray then I would have needed to use an extension there too.
