With front and right panels peeled away, the case's world was unfurled. To those wondering why the combipanel wasn't removed, even after such detail was given to its demise, that reason is simple - I'm not drilling out 20+ rivets until I'm good and ready to put water cooling into this beastie (come back next week for that one, readers).
With that being said, I'd like to start by taking a look at the case's front. Laid out in front of me are the eight external 5 1/2" bays, punctuated by a single external 3 1/4" bay. Behind this row of cages, there is a "Pause" so to speak before the motherboard tray begins (perhaps enough room for an extended motherboard), which is punctuated by a four disk hard drive cage far below. This cage takes hard drives by the user simply sliding them in, and then screwing them down via a series of raised dips on the case floor. The problem to the placement of this cage, though, is that users of bulky molded cables (the Original X-Connect, or OCZ's Modstream Cables) will be unable to close the case's door without running the risk of damaging the drives, or for that matter, tearing the heads off of Serial ATA cables (guilty of that one here). The only real issue to these drive cages is that the bottom 3 5 1/2" bays will be limited to extremely short units, should the user choose to use them. Apart from this, they are refreshingly free of restriction - apart from the fact that long cables are needed to feed the data to these disk drives.
Turning my attention slightly toward the rear of the case, the motherboard tray is clearly visible, complete with its large cleft behind the processor - presumably to help dissipate the heat it generates, but in reality only frustrating those of us whose motherboards have backplates that choose to fall off into this area. Installed in this tray are 6 6-32 threaded standoffs, in the traditional positions for an ATX motherboard. In my case, another 3 had to be added in order to properly support the rear of the board. Aside from these trivialities, there is nothing special to the motherboard tray, not even to the way which it holds the bottom of expansion cards in. As to the expansion card covers themselves, they are simple grey, replaceable slugs, held in place by the individual locking system which holds cards down without tools. Of course, this system must be removed, if you're going to use a two slot cooler, as each card has its metal plate held within an individual confine. On the plus side, these cards can still be held down with screws, so there are no worries here. Further down the panel are a pair of blanked out areas for serial/VGA/USB headers presumably, which sit just above the rear 120mm fan mount. The included fan here, as mentioned before is a low speed 3 pin model, which is placed to suck heat from your case in conjunction with the power supply below. As to the power supply bay itself, it should be able to hold some longer units, provided they do not employ modular connectors. This is facilitated by the large, rounded cut-outs in the bottom of the HDD cage. For users of standard sized PSUs that feature supports, there are threaded holes on the case's raised bottom to secure the supply in place. Apart from this, there is nothing special to see on the bottom of the case apart from the vents below each HDD. All in all, it's fairly standard fare inside - with enough innovation to interest many users, and just enough space to make things perfectly workable - that means big heatsinks ahoy for some of you users out there!
