After pulling the case out of the box you see the "Trademark" appearance of the Super Alien line, the "Alien Eyes" that makes up the 5.25" drive bay cover. The paint is nicely done, there are no signs of drips, runs or sections sprayed to lightly, and everything looks and feels evenly painted. A nice touch, that I am seeing a lot of, is the alien configuration on the fan covers.

Opening the 5.25" drive bay cover reveals five, yes five bays. I am not sure if I would need that many bays, but its nice to know they are there. My rig will use only two of these, a DVD-ROM and a DVD +R/W. The cover also reveals two 3.5" bays, of which I will be using a 3.5" floppy (yes I still have one:p) in one, leaving room for an optical or zip or what have you that fits the 3.5" requirement. We will go over later why there would be no need to use this for HD expansion.
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The lower cover (opened by simply pulling on the tab on the bottom) reveals the two front 80mm intake fans, this allows for easy access to replace or sight check for proper operation. Both of these fans have the "Blue Quad LEDs", they are lacking a filter, but with this panel that would be easily enough installed. In between the upper and lower door XP Cases.com mounted a panel that contains the Rheostats, Temp display, USB 2.0 ports, Microphone, Speaker (Headphone) and the Firewire port. Notice on the Temp display that the equipment you are measuring is already labeled for you, which is if you want to measure your HD and CPU from there.
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Moving to the Left side of the case we see a windowed panel that pretty much allows one to see EVERYTHING inside, if you want to hide your poor cabling ability (such as I have), your going have issues here. In this windowed side panel is another of the "Blue Quad LED" 80mm fans, this one is intake, and aims directly at the Video card slot, good thinking XP Cases.com.
The rear of the case we can see the 500W power supply on top, you also notice at this point that you can see INSIDE of the power supply, luckily, I don't have to do that wiring and from my point of view it looks very well done. The power supply has an 80mm "Blue Quad LED" fan here as well, this one is outtake. One thing I would like to see here is a pass thru plug for either your monitor or in my case, your water cooler (allows the pump to turn on when the system does), some higher end Power Supplies are once again putting in this connector.
There is also 2 80mm "Blue Quad LED" fans that are for outtake below the Power Supply, they are mounted high enough that they will assist in removing the hot air that builds up underneath the power supply in most systems. The top of the case has one more "Blue Quad LED" fan; my only question here is, why is this fan an intake fan? We have two in front and one on the left side of the case for intake. We have 2 in the rear for outtake. That's two more intakes than out! In my opinion, the fan on top of the case should be removing the hottest air inside the case, the air at the top.
Taking the windowed panel off the case is fairly easy and done without the need for tools. There are two thumb screws in the back and a lockable lever that allows the panel to swivel out and then be pulled away from the case. The plastic "saran" wrap that covers the window is harder to take off than it is to gain access. Once inside I start looking around, although the motherboard is removable, it is not of the slide out variety, this is a two Philips screw, slide towards the front (not an easy task with the angle you have to attack from) and pull up, yes, pull up. This is a removable tray that pulls up.
Once I got the tray out and started to mount the motherboard I appreciated the fact that I was not working inside the case. I do prefer the slide out tray, but this seems to work well also. Towards the front of the case is the "Hard Drive Array", there are five 3.5" slots with trays for you to mount your hard drives. I really liked this setup as the drives are oriented so that the back of the drive faces the window, this allows for much easier cabling and cable management (remember, I need all the help I can get here).

The cabling from the "Mid-Mount Panel" traverses behind this drive array as well, while installing my drives (trying to get them so air flow from the fans would flow nicely across them, i.e., stay out of the fans middle "blind spot"), I noticed that this cabling hindered my ability to install a drive in bay 3, I moved the cables around some and got the drive to "click" in place, but it was still a little tight. I really like the brackets used for the hard drives as well, they left a little bit of room around the outside to allow the drives to breath easier, looks like these might actually be 3.75" bays&
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Next we need to install the floppy drive in one of the front 3.5" bays as well as the DVD drives in the 5.25" bays. While installing the 3.5" floppy into the bottom bay, I ran into a slight glitch. You see, the cables for the mid-case panel are routed thru a small opening, and in my case, caught the floppy, luckily I did not attempt to "jam" the floppy into position or I could have done some damage (you know how we all like to "jam" things at times, hehe), this was only a minor inconvenience as I simply tucked the cabling further into the crevice and proceeded to install the floppy.
Next was the two DVD drives, I pulled the front covers off, and then of course the metal plate that stands in your way behind the cover (be careful not to cut your hand on one once you have removed it). I then looked through the box of goodies trying to find the slide rails&It did say that these were "Tool Free", so I proceeded to attempt to install the drive, nope, she needs rails as I thought, but they were no where to be found. So I had to do it, I had to check the manual (yes, it killed me) and those little bastards had put the rails on the back of the covers, actually a nice way to NOT lose any of your rails, like I am sure many of us have when we go back to install another device, 4 months later.
Well, these are not totally "Tool Free" as you will still need to screw in the 4 screws that hold the rail to the drive (I have only seen "Tool Free" once in my case building career, you don't want them, they snap onto the drive and rattle fierce every time the drive is accessed). The drives are a snug fit and snap in solidly, giving a very quiet operation.

As I stated mounting the motherboard on the removable tray was a snap, removing and re-installing the motherboard tray was another story. Removing it is a task because it snaps in securely, although this is a good thing, the angle at which you are trying to remove it from is cumbersome and makes getting the shelf out difficult. Installing the tray with the motherboard attached was also a chore, I had to remove the bottom 80mm fan due to the Game Port hit the fan when installing.
The saving grace here is that the two rear 80mm fans are quick release, I did not have to unscrew or remove 4 plastic clips to remove and replace the fan. Not all motherboards come with a game port anymore but I am sure there are still several out there so it is something to look for. Once I got the motherboard / tray past the fan I had to once again fight with the angle to get the tray to "snap" back in place, only this time I also had to ensure the back panel holes lined up properly with the appropriate connectors.