[section_title title=Closer Look – Interior and Installation]
Closer Look – Interior and Installation
Here is your first look at the inside of the W1. As you can see, it is made from a steel frame, which the side and roof panels then push into via a system of clips and pegs. Whilst this may sound a little flimsy to some of you, I can assure you that the case is extremely strong and does not flex or wobble at all.
On the right hand side of the chassis you can see that there are a lot of 3.5 inch hard drive bays and to the left of those is the motherboard tray. Under that is the PSU bay, which as you can see, provides enough room for the biggest of power supplies on the market.
Also, note the ventilation in the side panel. This is dust filtered by a fine mesh and is there to allow some unrestricted airflow to the GPU as it will be sandwiched up against that panel after installation. The design of the removable roof panel is the same as the side panel.
Here is a little look at the hard drive cage. This has space for four full size hard drives as well as four SSD’s if you use a bracket to make them fit the bays. On the top of this cage there is also a mounting point for a slot loading optical drive, which keeps it nicely out of the way for cable management.
These bays are also totally removable from the cases by removing the screws. Once these are removed, it gives you better access to the front fan if you wanted to change it out. Also, being able to remove this gives you more options for water cooling as it will give you more space up top as well as in the front for a radiator, and more overall space for a reservoir and pump.
Here is a closer look at the ‘front’ IO panel with the side panel removed. As you can see it is just a bare circuit board screwed to the case itself. You also can get a better look at the pair of SSD mounts in the bottom of the case. Also of note just below the IO is the recessed plastic clip that is used all over the case to attach the removable panels too.
Here is a little look at the power supply area of the case. Whilst I have used the small form factor Silverstone power supply for this, there are plenty of power supplies that will fit down here, in fact, I will stick my neck out and say that they all should due to the unrestricted space down there. You can see that I have managed to install the power supply along with an SSD for the boot drive, and that I have managed to tidy some of the cables away to keep it tidier in the main compartment. For people who would not be using a modular power supply, there is plenty of room in this area of the case to tie up the cables you would not use to keep the main compartment of the case nice and tidy.
Here is the build that we have managed to house in our W1. There are two things that I would like to point out here. Firstly, there is a still a good amount of clearance from the top of the CPU cooler to the roof. This should allow you to install a 120mm fan in the top of the roof if you wanted to improve the cooling of the case. The CPU cooler also exhausts directly into the rear fan, so the vast majority of the air generated from the CPU should be exhausted directly out of the case. Next up you will notice that I have managed to install an EVGA GTX770 graphics card, as it is slightly bigger than the MSI 270X that I usually use for testing. Whilst this is not the biggest graphics card on the market, it does shown that there is still a little more room to squeeze another card in, which is a big plus point for the case as it means that there is the potential to house a very powerful compact gaming rig.
Here is a quick photo to show the amount of clearance that you have from the top of the roof to the top of the cooler. There is plenty of room in there to fit an exhaust fan or even a radiator from an all in one CPU cooler such as a Corsair H100i.
