Akasa Venom Toxic Full Tower Chassis Review

3.5″ hard drives and 2.5″ SSDs are attached to their metal trays from underneath. 4 anti-vibration rubber mounts isolate any noise transferred from a 3.5″ hard drive ensuring your system operates as quietly as possible.

The roomy interior of the Venom Toxic is even more evident when a full system is installed inside. This XL-ATX supporting giant dwarfs our m-ATX motherboard and fairly long graphics card, proving that CrossFire or SLI are most certainly achievable with Akasa’s Venom Toxic. Cable routing is made extremely easy by the conveniently positioned grommets. A power supply with black sleeved cables will allow for an aesthetically pleasing system interior, but make sure the cable lengths are capable of spanning this sizeable chassis.

In practise, the tool-less 5.25″ drive clips worked very effectively. They were capable of holding our 5.25″ DVD drive in position without any security issues. Actually fitting the hard drives into the case was very simple. Just slide their tray into position and connect them from the rear.

CPU cooler clearance of around 185mm makes Akasa’s Venom Toxic one of the most accommodating cases on the market. The 185mm of clearance means that the case is capable of housing some of the tallest air coolers available such as Akasa’s own Venom Voodoo. A decent amount of clearance between the motherboard’s upper edge and the 230mm exhaust fan ensures that extremely wide CPU coolers such as Thermalright’s Archon should fit inside the Venom Toxic with minimal hassle. The tool-less PCI clips are surprisingly sturdy. They manage to keep our fairly large graphics card in position even when it is held by just PCI clip.

The cable management grommets located nearest to the power supply are very useful for routing all of the cables exiting the unit. Limited thought has been put into the cable management features when using an m-ATX motherboard, which, given the intended purpose of this case, is understandable.

The lack of an acceptable quantity of cable tie down points behind the motherboard tray impedes our attempts of keeping this area organised. The fact that the side panel was easily replaced, even with the mess of cables it had to surpass, speaks greatly for the magnitude of cable management clearance.

4 rubber grommets are perfect for routing water-cooling tubes, or in this instance, the front panel USB 3.0 pass-through cable. A pair of easily-removable thumb-screws holds each side panel in position without requiring the use of tools. Each of the 10 expansion slot covers is made from a mesh design which won’t block air flow.

The white LED fan emits a white glow which looks slightly blue with the front panel removed. Once the front panel is attached, the LED light appears to be blended more smoothly when observing it through the front panel mesh.