Closer Look: Interior

Now let's take a look at the interior of the BitFenix Shinobi case. No matter how nice the exterior looks, it could all be for nothing if the interior is not well thought out.

The interior of the Shinobi case is nicely laid out, there are plenty of cut-outs for cable management and the intake airflow is not restricted by the HDD bays. There are three tool free 5.25" drive bays, one of which is occupied by a 5.25" to 3.5" / 2.5" adapter and there are eight tool free 3.5" hard drive bays. The motherboard standoff holes are all nicely lablled and there is a key inside the 'H' that tells you which holes you need to use for each particular size of motherboard. Important dimensions to note are as follows; From the rear PCI expansion slots to the HDD bays (width for video cards) is 32.5cm and from the motherboard tray to the side panel (depth for CPU coolers) is 17.5cm by my own measurement.

The rear of the motherboard tray is merely a reflection of the front, with the main difference being that there are no tool free retention clips for the 5.25" bays on the reverse. There are plenty of cable tie down points on the reverse of the motherboard tray that allow for some very tidy cable management, but I'm not too keen on the space between the edge of the motherboard tray and the HDD rack because this makes hiding cables that bit more difficult.

A quick look at the front interior section of the case here with the main focus on the 3.5" HDD rack and the tool free retention clips. There are upsides and downside here, the main upside is that the HDD rack isn't restricting airflow with no HDD's installed and of course you won't need to mess about with screws to install or remove a hard drive. The downsides to this setup are that there are no anti vibration materials used, and from a cable management perspective the power and SATA cables will be more visible with HDD's mounted in this orientation.

Looking at the PSU area inside the case here we can see four pads that raise your PSU slightly and avoid any scratches where the PSU would make contact with the case. The mount for the 120mm intake fan towards the front of the case is quite close to the PSU area, this may cause an issue if you have a big PSU (in my case my PSU comes within millimeters of the fan mount) and getting a fan in here without the wires getting in the way could prove difficult. Also note that the PSU is slightly offset from the motherboard tray and that there is a nice cut out here too, this allows you to route your front panel USB and audio leads here for a nice clean install.

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