Interior & Installation
The bottom panel is removed via four screws, two on the left and two on the right of th chassis exterior. There are two cutaways on the sides of the bottom panel, these allow airflow through some discrete ventilation holes in the sides of the chassis.
The passive CPU cooling block features pre-installed mounting pegs, which will slot through your motherboard. The block passes heat through to the exterior panels of the chassis, effectively making the entire case a large CPU cooler.
The two metal strips screw onto the back of your 2.5″ drive, which can them be screwed directly to the inside of the top of the chassis; this must be done before installing the motherboard.
The motherboard I am using the Akasa H81TM
The 2.5″ drive must then be connected to the motherboard, prior to screwing the motherboard into the chassis. It’s a little bit of a tricky procedure, but doesn’t take more than a couple of minutes to get setup.
The motherboard then slots over the four CPU cooler counting pegs, and four bolts and small plastic washers hold it in place, as well as the four standard mini-ITX screws around the exterior of the motherboard.
All the IO ports are restricted to the back of the case.
The end result looks as sleek as it did when we took it out of the box, very stylish and of course it’s now time to test that passive cooler!
Since this is a pretty basic setup in terms of cooling and performance, there aren’t really a lot of tests that need to be done. Obviously acoustic levels were silent, as there are no moving parts in the system and those who want a completely silent build for their home AV setup will love this aspect. Idle performance was really good, just 5c above ambient and while overclocked performance isn’t going to break any world records, it’s certainly more than enough to keep our CPU well in the green.
