Detailed Interior Features

The hard drive trays themselves have vibration dampening rubber grommets. NZXT has also included enough hard drive screws to install a full nine hard drives.

The external bay drives are held in place with a plastic screw retainer each with two metal prongs that are inserted into the drive holes. I found this mechanism to be somewhat effective. They do make optical drive installation a breeze. They're only on the left side of the case so you don't have to remove the opposite side panel to install an optical drive.

The downside to using these external drive retainers is that the right side of the drive doesn't feel very secure. You push on the opposite of the drive and it will wobble back and forth. I prefer to just use standard screws to install optical drives. They just feel more secure that way. However, you can only install three screws, two on the left side and only one on the right side. The right side being the side that only allows you to use the screw hole near the back of the optical drive. Because of this, I found out that I couldn't install my fan controller or any device that is not a full length device. There are just no cutouts for the first set of screws to hold half sized devices like fan controllers unless you're willing to drill some holes yourself.

My fan controller also wouldn't fit because of the front door. It wouldn't close all the way because of the knobs but that would be true for any device that has buttons or knobs that stick out more than a quarter of an inch. Then I realized, "Why do I even need a fan controller for a case like this?" It's already supposed to be quiet right? Yes it is, but because of it's cooling performance issues, I was hoping to replace the fans with some high speed fans and use a fan controller to tone down the noise while still having better cooling performance when I needed it.

This is certainly not the prettiest install I've ever done but considering there is no side window on the case, does it really matter? Also, because there is foam on both side panels means that I couldn't hide any wires behind the motherboard tray and with the PSU on the bottom, it means that you might have to stretch and drape your power cables across the motherboard like I did for the 8 pin connector at the top left of my motherboard. I'm using a 1000 watt Thermaltake PSU which is longer than most PSU's and so are the included cables. There is some space to store all those cables directly in front of the PSU. It's not pretty but at least it doesn't impede airflow for the hard drives except maybe if you mounted one on the bottom tray. It's not really as bad as it looks though.

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