NZXT Aperture M Card Reader Review

Out of the box we get our first proper look at the Aperture M device, as you can see it features a simple frame that allows it to fit in a standard 5.25″ optical drive bay slot on the front of your PC chassis, which you can then lock into place using the included screws, although it should also work with any quick release drive lock systems that your chassis may have.

The front of the device is the most important part, first of all because its the part you’re going to be interacting with and its the bit you have to look at once the device is installed, fortunately NZXT have done a great job on the styling,

Around the back we can see the reader features a simple PCB for the actual card reading slots with a single USB 2.0 cable running from there as seen with the white connector that has 4 small cables running from it. On the left oyu can see the back of the USB 3.0 port, which is independant from the card reader and has a native USB 3.0 connection cable running from it.

The other end of these cables can be seen here, both with standard motherboard connectors, the USB 3.0 requires a native USB 3.0 socket on your motherboard, I’m sure you could run this off USB 2.0 if you have the appropriate adaptor, but NZXT don’t include one in the box. The other connection is for the card reader and is a regular USB 2.0 connection, this supplies the data from the cards to your motherboard as if your memory cards were USB flash drives.

Mounted in our NZXT 810 Switch Special Edition we can see that the device looks pretty tidy once installed, giving you easy access to each of the slots, even though the mesh design doesn’t match this chassis I still think it looks pretty good.