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Internals
Taking the covers off reveals a high attention to build quality and detail. No sharp flimsy sheetmetal lurks within - instead, nicely rolled edges to stop you hacking your hands to bits inside the case and the metal used in the drive bays and back panel etc seems to be slightly thicker than other cases I've looked at recently. Rigidity is further enforced by two rods running from very top to very bottom inside the front of the case. These serve as pivot points for the removable case sides, but I imagine also provide a fair bit of chassis strength.

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Opening the case up reveals no lack of features inside. There's a few loose goodies in there including a power cord and the biggest bag of screws I've ever seen included with a case. Also in the little cardboard box were keys (for the lockable side-panel and front door) and a ferrous core as you see around video cables etc - bit of a strange inclusion, not sure where they expect us to use that. Anyway, the large white objects at the front of the picture above are 8 pairs of drive rails, to use on drives in the top 5.25" bays - more on them later. There's no manual included, not even a quick sheet of instructions. I know, cases are pretty simple, but this one has a few features that could do with a little explaining for newbies trying to build a PC into it..

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..like these funky purple fan mounts. A quick inspection shows they are held on only by 4 tabs, but trying to slide them off to one side would result in the handle being snapped off by a hamfisted person. Instead, you simply pull them directly away from the case backplate and they pop off. There's a few other things like this in the case that perhaps you and I could work out fairly simply, but might frustrate people with less experience. A simple sheet with even just an exploded diagram as included with many cases these days, would go a long way to improving a novice's experience with this case.

One of the first internal things that grabs the eye is the extra internal drive bay at the bottom front of the case. In fact, both these cages are interesting in that they are removable - by moving the little swinging lever at the top of each one. The bottom one does not hang directly off the top one as you may think, they can be removed independently. Each one has space for three 3.5" devices and there are mounting holes for third-height (most IDE drives) and half-height (some SCSI drives) devices. The bottom removable bay even has a fan mounting space in the front of it - the top doesn't, because the top 2 slots in that bay have front external access for floppy drives, zip drives etc.

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The stock front fan is a fairly unexciting "Globe Fan" sleeve-bearing unit. It doesn't move an incredible amount of air but it is very quiet. It has an intelligent 3-pin connector and also a small green capacitor is visibly connected to one of the cables as it enters the fan motor body. I'm not sure if that is part of some internal thermal speed control for the fan - the fan RPM's didn't seem to change during the time I used the case. The purple plastic mount is universal so you could fit an aftermarket fan easily enough. The purple blocky thing next to the fan mount is a card guide for full-length cards.

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The included PSU is an HEC 300W unit. Fairly unexciting and lacking any extra cooling fans, but the main fan is thermally controlled and the unit is AMD and Intel P4 approved. PC trainspotters might be wondering why Macase are not using their own brand of PSU in this case. I've not heard of any problems with Macase PSU - indeed, there's a 300W unit in our server Odin which has been powered almost constantly for the last 15 months or so. Apparently, for whatever reasons, Macase are moving away from the PSU side of things to focus on cases, from desktops to servers and even rackmount chassis. Anyway no complaints about this unit, it runs very quietly and has a switch on the back which makes shutting off the ATX standby power easy (for changing RAM, etc).

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In many PC cases, the horizontal support that separates the top section from the bottom section makes it difficult to get enough cables from the motheboard or controller cards (in the bottom) to drives in the top. This is more of an issue in fulltower cases than midtowers, but it's nice to see that Macase have put in an effort to give plenty of room in this case.

Next Page - Usage and Conclusions

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