Right away my eye is drawn to all those drive bays. Four separate ones for the optical drives or whatever you like to stick in there, and five for all your HDDs. Can you imagine the Raid array in this thing? It would be awesome. And to keep it all cool, four 120mm fan mounts. And it looks like a Batman tank/car thing? This is just screaming to be stuffed with lots of gaming hardware. Alrighty, so now we know what it is and what it does, let’s see what it’s capable of. Time to get messy.
As always, we’ll start with what’s in the box. Of course, there is the case itself surrounded by a protective cocoon of Styrofoam, wedged into the box so tight that I had to grab both sides of the case and put my foot on the box to pull it out. A pain, but puts aside any worries of shipping-related jar damage. Once the side of the case was off, which is achieved with two plastic thumbscrews, you find the various connectors for the fan, audio, eSATA and USB ports on the top. There is also a box wedged into the HDD bays that contains all the screwless HDD and optical drive locks. Underneath this is a letter from NZXT thanking me for purchasing the case and telling me where to go to see more of their stuff or to get questions answered. Handy.
My first feelings on this case are how super heavy it is. There are heavier cases out there, but for this one’s size it is pretty darned weighty. Being made of steel can really add some baggage to a PC. But for the added durability and stability, you can’t beat a solid steel case. This one wasn’t nearly as weighted as I was expecting, as they didn’t include the 500W power supply for me to test as well. That would have been a nice little extra for this piece, but alas… The coolest thing is that they actually painted the inside to match the outer flat black finish. It’s really a nice touch and gives it a much more aggressive look than those that are painted so nice on the outside and are dull metal gray on the inside. And then the front power and reset buttons. They are in a triangular shape to match the case, and glow blue to match the LED fan in the front.
They also replaced the standard front pop-out bezels with mesh bezels for increased airflow. I was told early in my computer years by my mentor that for the best airflow in a case, there should be no place anywhere on a case for the air to flow aside from where the fans are. However, later on in my life, I realized that those drives up top give off quite a lot of heat themselves, and with no airflow hitting them, as is the case most of the time, they can create an enormous heat buildup. So having the front bezels meshed is a great idea as far as I’m concerned. And to match the bezels, the ridges down the front are also covering mesh that guards the blue LED fan inside. Looking at the back of the case, we see that the rear PCI slot covers are also mesh. Welcome to the future, ladies and gents. Things might actually start looking cooler now.
On the next page we render our verdict…
