GMC K2 Ebony R2 Toast and R3 Corona Review :: K2 Noblesse Exterior

Case front

Case right side

Case left side

Case rear

The K2 Noblesse EBONY case is a mid tower ATX case. One thing you'll notice after taking it out of the box is the two DVD drive bay doors. While many mid tower cases have four or even five bays in this position, the GMC case only has two places to install optical drives. The drives are easy to install with screwless drive rails that attach to the side of each drive then lock the drive into place.

DVD Drive bays

Multi-card reader

MCR instructions

Power buttons

After looking at the case it is clear why there's only two drive bays. Under the 5.25" drive bays is the VFD display. Vacuum Fluorescent Displays have the advantage of being brighter than Liquid Crystal Displays. The VFD displays the different modes in operation from hardware, to dynamic graphics equalizers to RSS feeds. You can customize the VFD within the iMedian software to display what you want to see.

FP IO

Rear fan

Case on the side

Side door open

Under the VFD display is an array of buttons to control the multimedia functions of the case. There is a play/pause button, a mute button, a fast forward, fast back forward one step, back one step, light, reset , stop, next channel , Volume Up and Down, Music, TV, Photo and Movie button on the top array of buttons. The Power button is in the middle of the buttons. The bottom array of buttons consists of four directional arrow keys, the review key, the Enter key, and the Cancel key for the onscreen utility.

The side door of the case is an interesting. There is a large funnel that would cover the CPU area of the motherboard and a mesh window on the bottom where the video card would be installed. The funnel might block some tall coolers like the V8 cooler but works well with most other CPU coolers without issue. There's plenty of airflow in the case with the funnel, the window, the front fan and the rear fan providing sufficient cooling.

Under the top row of buttons is a multi-card reader. This reader supports 9 different kinds of memory cards. As an entertainment PC the MMC and the buttons are necessary to fully utilize the various devices one can use with the PC. The choice of using buttons on the remote, or using buttons on the PC or in Windows is an important one. GMC put a lot of thought into their case design as most people do not use more than two optical drives. On the bottom of the case is the FP IO (Front Panel Input/Output). The IO consists of 4 USB 2.0 ports, a Firewire port and a HD Audio/Microphone port. The only thing missing is an external SATA port, but that is rather fancy.