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THE INTERIOR
Case interior. Note the Coolcases-supplied
Globe fans and fan wiring job. Included accessories are laying in the bottom
of the case. Note the depth of this case as well. It's not explicitly mentioned
but it looks like it may well fit an E-ATX board for all you dual-CPU fans!
A typical Chenbro interior similar to the Gaming Bomb includes the green plastic hardware and
the 10 square holes for installing the snap-in motherboard risers. This case has a fixed motherboard tray. The interior is quite roomy for a case
of this size, due, perhaps to the compact size of the drive bays. This makes it easy to install the motherboard. The
absence of a side reinforcing crossbar (found in many Antec cases) also helps.
The fixed right side panel, .030-.035" thick
steel construction, rolled edges and simple interior design all come together
to make this a very sturdy case, especially for this price range.
The case looks like it is descended from Chenbro's well-built server cases. The robust
construction of the PC-610 eliminates case resonance as a source of noise, unlike the aluminum cases that have
come through Hutter Labs recently. Steel may not be as sexy, but it's certainly
an advantage if you're trying to build a quiet system.
The interior features the three external 5.25" bays and 2 external 3.5"
bays as well as the removable two bay cage for the internal 3.5" drives.
The external drives are designed to mount with snap-in rails but the 5.25"
drives can also be secured by screwing them into the left side of the case
using screws that are supplied in the accessory pack.
Note all the room that's
available behind the front intake fan. You can mount the hard drives in the
supplied cage by screwing them into the (grommetless) cage, or for best quieting, remove the drive cage entirely and suspension
mount the drive(s) below the fixed drive cages, directly in front of the
cooling airflow provided by the 120mm intake fan. Another option would be
to mount the drive(s) inside a noise-reduction enclosure like the Smart
Drive. Any of these
methods is easily applied due the large available space.
Directly below the
HDD bays is the green plastic card retention bracket. This rather
quaint feature is designed to support extremely long PCI cards,
rarely seen these days, at least in consumer-oriented cases. Another holdover
from their server cases, perhaps?
On the back panel there are seven card slots adjacent to the green plastic tool-less card retention bracket. This retention
bracket holds the cards in place with a small camming latch for each
individual card. It is also removable and the cards can be screwed to the case in the usual way. I'm old school; I chose
the screw-down method.
Card lock assembly. While it works just
fine, I opted to remove it and screw the cards in the old-fashion way.
Moving upwards we see the standard snap in I/O panel. A generic
version is supplied, but it's easily removable for replacement with a board-specific version. Adjacent to the I/O
plate is the 120mm Globe fan.
The PSU mounts using the standard ATX pattern mounting holes and sits on
a shelf at the back wall. There's about 3/4" of airspace
above the PSU which is handy for hiding any extra PSU wiring. As someone
who takes care to neatly dress the case wiring, this case was a real challenge.
The fixed right side panel and interior design made it much more difficult
than usual. The case is supported by a set of four 1/2" high hard plastic
snap-in feet.
To sum up, it's
a sturdy, fairly roomy, small stature case with what appears to be good airflow
characteristics and a nice variety of HDD mounting options. It's certainly
not a flashy case, but the basic black color and sort of bland appearance
should make it easy to fit into a wide variety of decor.
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