SunbeamTech Samurai Case Review

Cases & PSU/Cases by JNav89GT @ 2004-12-17

With a distinctive front bezel and side window, the Sunbeam Samurai Case attempts to grab prospective buyers with a penchant for standing out amongst the crowd. Does function follow form though in this pre-modded case? Step inside to find out!

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Form and Function

Form and Function

After the case arrived, I chose to take several pictures of the interior of the case as seen below. The case came well packed and I would imagine it would take about two to three times the usual carelessness of UPS or FedEx to cause damage to the unit. Taking off the side reveals the well thought out innards.

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Tool less case designs are becoming rather popular of late, and Sunbeam does an admirable job in this department. The 5.25 and 3.5 inch bays are all “snap in and latch” mechanisms that I found fairly easy to use. Occasionally, it would take 2-3 attempts to get the drive locked in. However, I would still consider this faster than screwing 4 tiny screws in, especially with old ogre hands such as mine.

After the motherboard is installed, I would recommend installing drives next, as space gets to be a bit tight after graphics and other PCI cards are installed. This makes the addition of Hard-Drives almost impossible unless such cards are removed.

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Near the back of the case, just above the area of the CPU socket, there is a dual 80mm fan shroud/housing. The Samurai comes with one 80mm fan present in this shroud. From what I can tell it is a decent unit, and appears to be your typical 80mm sleeved bushing fan pushing what I would estimate to be high 20’s to low 30’s cfm.

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The fan shroud/housing is somewhat of a necessary evil on this case due to the stepped design of the back of the case. The stepped design in the back of the case is caused by the tool less AGP/PCI card locking mechanism design used by Sunbeam for this case. My initial thought of this design, was that this stepping would impede flow due to the pressure change across ½ of the 80mm fan. We will discuss this in further detail during testing section.

As stated above, the case comes with one 80mm fan that is installed in the rear fan shroud. While better than nothing at all, I would think a case of this stature should come with at least 2 fans, preferably LED fans. Sunbeam did come through several days later with a box full of goodies for me including LED 80mm Fans, two blue Cold Cathode light kits, and several other bells and whistles. The 80mm fans push about 32.5CFM each. Using another Blue LED light for the front fan intake, this should approximately equal the flow of the case fans in the generic Antec Soho Filer Server Case used in comparison.

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Furthermore, I chose to install an 80mm Blue LED Coolermaster 38cfm Fan in the intake position in the front of the Samurai case to provide cool intake air. The generic Antec case I will be comparing the Samurai to in regards to temps does have an advantage though as this older case houses 2*80mm intake fans. We will see how the Samurai compares to this excellent case design that Antec deployed a few years back, and has been copied by many case designers in various flavours.




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