[section_title title=P3 : Interior Analysis]
Interior Analysis:
Moving onto the interior of the case, first thing we notice is that it has a lot of HDD space. There is space for 5 x 3.5″ HDDs and you can install up to 9 x 2.5″ drives! If you want to use a long graphics card, you can easily remove the removable HDD cage. So for the loss of 3 HDDs, you can install really long cards in this case. Even the bottom 2 HDD slots can be removed by removing a few screws. Even the optical drive bay can be removed, thus giving you a lot of space to play around with, specially if you want to go for a custom water cooling solution.
Its really simple to remove the lower cage and the top ODD bay…you just got to remove these screws (sorry for the dusty pics, its gets dirty quickly here). For the optical bay, you need to remove 2 screws from the front of the chassis as well, so just keep that in mind.
Removal of the front panel is also pretty simple. All you gotta do is just push these tabs sideways and the front panel pops out itself. Once you do that, you can clearly see the front intake fan holes. As mentioned before, you have a lot of options, right from 230mm fans to 120mm. I noticed a small issue here though, if you do go for 2 120mm fans in the front, you will have to sacrifice you sole optical bay, I hope Bitfenix can come up with a design that can fix this issue.
When you remove the bottom HDD cage, it gives you a lot of space, here, there are a lot of 2.5″ HDD mounting options, I have shown just of of the possible locations. So one is on the bottom as shown, there are 2 more possible places on the PSU cage.
The PSU cage has a depth of 180mm, but that does not mean that you can use power supplies that are 180mm long, you should take into account the cables themselves. I would not suggest you use PSUs that are longer than 160mm in this case. This should be enough for most users, as you can get good 700W PSU with this limitation. But if you need more power, you might have a problem. Not sure if it is a good idea, but as an interim fix, they could provide a bent PSU face plate, that can give an additional 15-20mm length.
Taking a more closer look at the side panel, we notice that it not only provides USB 3.0 support, but is also backward compatible and provides a USB 2.0 option as well. I really think its a good thing done by Bitfenix, hope all manufacturers adopt the same. Its very useful in case your motherboard does not come with a USB 3.0 header, you can still use these ports. In my case though, it was even more useful since my USB 3.0 header broke (I will take about this in the next section), so my USB ports were still usable. The power and HDD LEDs are pretty bright, its not really an issue for me, but some might find it distracting.Just in case you are wondering what the ‘grill’ kind of structure in the above side panel is, its actually a 2.5″ HDD cage! You can mount 2 2.5″ HDDs on the side panel as well.