Closer Look: Interior

The first thing you notice when you open up the case is this large metal arm which swivels outward and allows you to mount two 120mm fans (not included) for cooling video cards. I like not having to mount the fans on the window itself. This way I can remove the side panel without having to disconnect the fan cables everytime. Plus it eliminates any vibration noise that may occur. You can also remove the arm if you don't plan on mounting any fans on it.

Here you also see the hot swappable hard drive connector. The case only comes with one but you can order more directly from Silverstone if you plan on using this feature in like a RAID setup. Directly above the removable hard drive cage and below the 3.5 inch external drive bays is a place for a fifth hard drive using the supplied black mounting rails. The power supply bracket bar can also be removed to ease installation of large power supplies. I didn't have to remove it for my installation and I'm using a 1000watt Thermaltake PSU that's 8 inches long and without modular cabling.

When I went to remove the side panels, I noticed there were no thumbscrews, now most PC enthusiasts balk at this since they're always removing the side panels to tweak something inside, myself included. I suppose though Silverstone had to trim costs somewhere to achieve the price point they were targeting but I personally felt thumbscrews should've been included. However, the good news is that I found no sharp edges to be found anywhere. All metal cutouts are folded over or have filed down edges to protect your hands and fingers from those nasty little cuts. They're also good for cabling management as well. The only problem I had with cable management involved the front audio cable. It's simply not long enough to reach the most common spot on motherboards for it to plug into, the lower left corner. It will reach but you can't try and hide it or tuck it away anywhere.

Now just to illustrate how much room is inside this case, here is what it looks like with all my goodies installed. First of all, the power supply is an 8 inch long unit with extremely long cables and not to mention excess cabling that includes 6 PCI express power connectors. Obviously my setup doesn't need that many cables but as you can see here, I've managed to somewhat hide all that extra cabling but it wasn't easy. When you have such a large case, you would think it would be conducive to storing excess power supply cabling but I found out that all that extra room just makes it harder to store it out of sight. My video card is 10.5 inches long. As you can see here, I still have a couple (almost three) inches to spare before it hits the hard drives. Aftermarket CPU coolers shouldn't be a problem either given the amount of room between the motherboard and power supply. The spec sheets indicate this case supports extended ATX motherboards and it's obvious here that it does. The motherboard tray is not removeable but with a case this big, it's simply not neccesary. I could get my big paws around inside of it without any problems whatsoever.

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