When you hop into a brand new GMC, you know you are getting all the power of a gas guzzling, four wheel drive behemoth that has sustained rednecks in their quest to get to their sister’s trailer for the last few decades. Oh… this isn’t that kind of GMC. Okay, I’ll start over. Sorry rednecks.
If there’s one thing nerds and geeks love to do with a new case, it’s destroy it and make something cooler out of it. But what if you had a case whose ROM drive popped up like toast? Yeah, I’d still mod it too, but wouldn’t that be cool? Introducing the GMC R-2 Toast. This thing cool looking on its own, but when you add in the little extras that GMC were generous enough to throw in, it’s actually pretty damned sweet.
My case is white with a black front and a flashy chrome disc in the middle. Blue LED lights shine down from inside the front. And if that isn’t enough, the optical drive mounts vertically, so the drawer actually pops up instead of out. Just like a piece of toast. Crusty. Here are some specs on the case itself:
| Model | R2 ‘Toast’ |
| Dimension ( W x D x H ) | Chassis 180 x 290 x 420 mm |
| Color | White, Black, Lime Green, Hot Pink, Ocean Blue, Sky Blue |
| Drive Bay | 5.25″ x 1, 3.5″ x 2 (internal) |
| Expansion Slots | 7 Slots |
| Motherboard Size | ATX, Micro ATX, Full ATX |
| Weight | 4.2 Kg |
| Cooling | CAG 1.1 |
| Rear Fan | 80mm x 2 |
Okay, so what comes with it and how hard is it to load full of goodies? Okay, let’s check it out and find out. In the box was the case itself. Inside this was a bag of mounting screws to attach your mobo, hard drive, and vertical optical disk drive (or ODD as GMC calls it). There is also an easy to follow instruction book written completely in Korean. Thank the Holy Watchers for illustrations, or I would have been lost trying to get all these computer parts in there.
Everything fit in there quite nicely, except for my heatsink and fan. On the Toast, there are five different places to put a fans. One in the front, one in the floor, two in the back, and one on the side with a plastic bezel that directs the airflow directly to the CPU. This bezel without a fan is about two inches. Add a fan that’s another half an inch. So I decided to get rid of this thing all together. I put the side of the case on, and it cleared my heatsink by a mere 1/8 of an inch. A tight fit, but it did fit. I mounted the hard drive, the DVD-ROM, video card, and power supply. By the time I got all of this in there there was pretty much no room left for anything else. The inside of this case is rather small, and is not meant for any large amount of extras.
Okay, I close up the side of the case for the final time, and I go to work on checking out the features of the case as a working unit. On the side of the case is the button that opens or closes the optical drive. It works by pushed down a spring-loaded hammer that hits the button on the front of the drive and opens it up. And just as promised, my “toast” popped up, ready for a fresh disc. On top of the case is a little door that opens to reveal microphone and headphone ports, and two USB 2.0 ports. There is also a reset button hidden in there as well.
I have to say the fan space was a welcomed surprise. The many places to cram fans would greatly increase the air flow even in quarters as tight as these. There were a couple of things that I didn’t like about the case, however. One was the area to mount the hard drive. There is just enough space to put a single HD, and that is it. I read that there was room for another, but the only place I could find was beneath the first one. Where there were only two screw holes and would completely block access the the fan that is intended to cool off the HD. If you want extra storage, you had better have an external drive on standby. As for RAID, you can pretty much forget it in this case. Which is sad because most newer boards are built to support RAID arrays.
My other issue is the same as the first, only it involves the optical drive. Sure, it’s cool that it pops up like frigging toast, but what good does that do me if I want more stuff in there? I like addons. Bigger cases come out all the time simply for the amount of bays on the front. With this, you are stuck with your optical drive and one HD. So they better be the two things you cherish most.
Now, before you think I am knocking on this case unfairly, let me set the record straight. If you are build a low-mid level machine for slightly moderate use, this is probably the perfect case for you. It’s sleek, it’s cool, and it is very appealing to the eyes when you see that drive tray pop up. It is quite impressive in its own right. But I recommend that you consider what you are planning for your system, and then decide whether this is all you are ever going to need or whether a bigger case would suit your plans better. In closing, I enjoyed the R-2 Toast. It’s a fun case that is a nice change from the ordinary, and I hope that they guys at GMC in Korea keep churning out innovation. But next time I want something bigger.
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3 Comment
I'm designing a case mod for this computer case, and I'll link to it here when I'm completed with it. I plan on getting 3 hard drives inside, as well as a 200mm fan mod on the side for insane cooling, and complete noise drop.
Hopefully they will release a micro atx of this that the cdrom pops out on very most top of the case
i think its cool
I don't see this anytime soon. The optical drive drawer is protected on all sides the way they have it now. Popping up out of the top, with users having a tendency to put random stuff on top of their towers, would probably cause problems in the long run. But that would be pretty nice and much easier to get to.