Akasa MAX MT Fanless NUC Chassis Review

Interior

Opening up the chassis is pretty straight forward and you can take out the pre-installed 2.5″ dock with just four easy to access screws. The unit is nicely self-contained and the SATA cables on the back are pretty self-explanatory. There’s no need to remove this dock to install drives, but you will need it out of the system to install a motherboard.

The interior of the chassis is obviously longer than the compact NUC motherboards, so you’ll find a range of cables pass through from the front panel, ensuring you don’t lose any of the functionality of the system.

You’ll find USB, power, audio and even an IR extender all come pre-installed. The large cut-out at the front is for the HDD dock which we saw earlier.

Fairly standard backplate here, as well as four stand-offs for the motherboard. What’s really cool though is the aluminium block under the motherboard, this is the main part of the chassis that is used as the heat sink for the CPU, which then transfers the heat through the rest of the chassis, allowing for completely passive and silent cooling.