Cooling

The 3D Storm comes with 3x120mm fans preinstalled, each one rated at a low 1000rpm for silent operation. Each fan is fitted with a 3-pin connector and also comes with a 4-pin adapter giving you a choice on how to hook up the fans. Excellent feature, as not all case fans give you this possibility, most use a 4-pin connector which doesn’t make it easy to hook the fan up to 5.25” fan control devices. Sunbeamtech resolves this problem by providing you with both connectors.

If you find that three fans are not enough, there is room for one 120mm in the front, which sits in front of the HDD bay. We decided to install a 800rpm model from Noctua to measure the cooling effect.



Accessing the front fan requires the removal of the lower HDD bay, which only takes a couple of screw turns. The in-take at the lower portion of the front panel seems to be made out of three layers, allow for air to pass through the small holes, but filtering smaller objects and larger dust particles.

Installation

Installation was a breeze, the tool less features of the 3D Storm work excellent, going from the slide and snap optical drive installation:



To the HDD rail system which also clicks into place:



Inventive features are these motherboard stand offs which pop slightly out of the motherboard mounting holes, only a handful of these are in the tool bag, but they help tons to let the motherboard fit inside correctly without having to experiment with aligning the stand offs with the motherboard. This photo doesn’t do the system justice:



AGP/PCIe/PCI installation is made easy with these plastic clips which turn from the outside, towards the bracket and they snap the card into place. We did not have much trouble fitting a double slot VGA card like the 8800 GTX.



Since this is a compact mid-tower case we were worried initially about the compatibility with a larger VGA card, but the NVIDIA 8800 GTX managed to squeeze in unscathed:




Onto the 3D core-fan installation ->