The back side of the front panel includes some interesting items. The 4 silver colored items are where the four blue LED’s are located. It allows for an interesting effect, where the LED’s are barely visible from the front, but the light is totally shown through. They remind me of the guide around a flashlight, which helps direct the light. Just below the lights is the front USB and audio piece. I really liked the fact that this piece is covered in plastic, where most are just open circuit board. Although unnoticeable from the front, it leaves less of a chance of shorting the board when pulling off the front panel.
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The next series shows some of the nicer features of the case. Seeing as this case is an empty slate in the area of windows, it was nice to see that the top panel can be removed using a screw driver. My previous case was riveted on and it was a large hassle to remove. The other picture shows the removable motherboard tray. (Yes you read it right) Almost extinct in today’s market, the removable motherboard tray is a favorite of a lot of computer users. I personally never liked them (always found it hard to line up the board properly) but some users use them a lot and it was a nice addition.
Installation
Components being installed include:
Asus A7N8X Deluxe
AMD TBred 1700+
512MB PC2700
Asus 52x24x52x CDRW
Pioneer DVD
Western Digital 80GB Cavier SE
Blue Cold Cathode
Installing all of my components was a breeze. All items for the case are labeled well, so it made for an easy install. The case came with 6 preinstalled motherboard stands, which saved a little bit of time. The case gladly uses standard ATX components, including the back IO plate. The removable motherboard tray was unnecessary for the installation of my A7N8X-Deluxe motherboard as it slid right into place. The connections for the front audio and USB were easy to figure out. If you have problems the included page on the connections and your motherboard’s manual should be enough information to figure it all out. The case also came with more than enough screws to install my motherboard, cd-rw, DVD drive, disk drive, hard drive, and add-in cards. As you can see in the below picture, everything fit in, and looks not to bad either.
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I have always hated the way that CD-Drives and disk drives look. Especially when you have a different colored case than the standard beige. So after spending a very short amount of time with nothing more than double-sided tape, old crappy CDs, screwdriver and some model glue I ended up with this. The disk drive I installed in the case backwards, so whenever I need to use a disk (which is never) I can just pop off the side panel.
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