A look inside

The case layout is quite straightforward, no fancy tool less features or strange constructions; the motherboard is not removable but there’s enough room to maneuver inside this case; installing the power supply first is advised.



The front USB and Firewire headers are not bundled, so you stuck with a series of small leads and you better have your motherboard manual at hand when you want to hook them up. A second set of wires come from the fan controller which accepts 4-pin connectors.



As mentioned earlier, no fancy tool less features so the 5.25” and 3.5” bays look quite bare and plain, enough room to fit 7 hard drives and 4 optical drives:




Putting some hardware inside

After screwing around a bit (literally) I ended up installing the following system inside the case:

[M] P4 S478 Test Setup
CPU	Intel P4 2.4 "C"
Cooling	Cooler Master Hyper 48 with Papst 3412N/2GL 92mm fan (rated at ~23dBA/36CFM)
Mainboard	Asus P4C800
Memory	2 * 512Mb PC3200 Mushkin LVLII V2
Other	Chaintech FX5900XT with Arctic Cooling Silencer installed Chieftec 340W PSU Maxtor 20Gb Slimline HDD Plextor 12x Writer

I did not encounter issues during the installation, no sharp edges to cut myself and the case allows enough room for decent airflow.

The only out-take in the case will be the power supply (unless you use a passively cooled model), optionally you can install one 120mm fan in the rear or 2x80mm models.



The hard drive sits right in front of the in-take fan which will benefit cooling enormously; the hard drive is hard mounted to the case so vibrations from the spinning platters and head seeks will be transferred to the case’s metal construction.



With all the goodies installed it’s time for some performance and noise tests ->