Interior
While this is a “mid-tower” it’s certainly on the larger side, but still not quite as big as a full-tower. That extra space is no bad thing though, as the interior of the Observatory provides room for some pretty serious hardware. There’s room for a larger E-ATX motherboard in this case. There’s are cable routing holes and channels on all sides of the motherboard, as well as a large cut-out behind the motherboard, allowing for easy installation and changes to your hardware.
To the right of the motherboard, there’s a vertical guard, providing some coverage for the cable routing holes, some mounting points for liquid cooling hardware, and a GPU support bar. However, if you’re installing an E-ATX motherboard, this bar will need to be removed, as you’ll see in my build later in this review.
Towards the front, you’ll find the fans are fitted on the exterior frame of the chassis, but obviously otherwise shrouded by the front panel. This means that the case interior is left very clean and tidy and the fans won’t conflict with your PC hardware.
However, while there are three gorgeous 120mm ARGB fans pre-installed, there’s clearly room for a wide variety of 120mm or 140mm configurations. There’s also a large cut-out in the PSU shroud, allowing the full height of the case to be used for a 420mm radiator. You could even fit 2 x 200mm fans in the front panel if you so desired.
At the back, there’s a fourth ARGB 120mm fan pre-installed, and they can all be wired into the included Umbra ARB controller too, making syncing super easy, and enabling RGB control from the front I/O panel RGB button.
The PSU shroud is nice and robust, and will do a fine job of hiding the power supply, all your excess cable gore, and a few bit of storage, but otherwise leaving your case interior looking neat and tidy.
Behind the motherboard, you’ll find loads of cable routing space to play around with. Again, that PSU shroud will literally pick up the slack if needed too, so getting clean cable management should be a breeze.
There are Velcro straps to deal with the larger cables easily enough.
As well as plentiful cable tie loops dotted all over the place.
There’s a removable bracket here, allowing you to mount a pair of 2.5″ drives right behind the motherboard.
There’s also a pair of 3.5″ drive mounts in the bottom of the case too. However, you can slide this bay to make room for either larger PSUs, or the other way to make way for front panel radiators. Or, if you prefer, you can remove it entirely and benefit from the extra cable management space.
