Thumper

Well, got the new case for my Presler system on friday. Thankfully it was undamaged no thanks to UPS. The box was broken in 4 places and a 3" length of the bottom edge was actually torn off almost completly. I could stick 2 fingers inside this hole and touch the bare metal of my case.

I was so excited I didn't think to grab the camera and take pics of it out of the box. I just wanted to get started first thing Saturday morning.

Now, I have some very nice things to say about this case..........I also have a few bad things.


We'll start with the good since, overall, I do like this case a lot.

First off, it's VERY attractive. The front panel is plastic, but is very sturdy. The door is not one of those pressure hinged models designed to force itself closed, those always bother me. The overall design of the front panel is very sleek and high tech looking. If it were me, I would have put a few LEDs behind the round accent in the center, but that's a nitpick. The use of grills and mesh make it look very high-tech.



The side window design fits nicely as well, at first the honeycomb look was odd, but it has sort of grown on me. This design is supposed to help with EMI emissions.



You can probably already see one of my complaints in the photos. If not, don't worry, I'll show you.

It's big. I didn't expect it to be that big and when I pulled it out of the box I was impressed. It's not long, about the same as any mid-tower, but it's very tall. I actually may move it to the other side of the desk as it looks funny so tall on the end.

The AeroCool Spiral Galaxies is also very sturdy, but not extremely heavy either. The side panels are solid, as is the top and bottom.

Now we move to the inside, and the downsides to this beautiful case.






This case, for those that didn't notice, is designed for the ATX system with some BTX principles. the motherboard mounts on the opposite side and is upside down. This places the CPU and heatsink at the bottom of the case where the coolest air is. This is the crux of the problem with the case.

The cabling is not exactly pretty as I haven't sleeved this PSU yet, but the design of the case presents unique cabling problems anyway. basically, motherboard manufacturer's and PSU manufactureur's did not design their products with this "upside down ATX" in mind. The 4-pin CPU power lead is almost to short to reach to the bottom of the case where the 4pin socket is on the motherboard. As you can see, it barely reaches, and only does so by being majorly in the way. I'll have to find a cable extender or splice in extra wire length myself later.

Adding to the cable confusion is that the hard drives slide in backwards. now, on one hand this does help in cleaning up the cabling look as there are no cables coming right out against the side window, however, it does make it more difficult to attach the cables to the drives, and again, you will need longer than standard cables in most cases. Luckily I had some spare OEM SATA cables that came with my board as my red UV reactive one I bought too clean up the old case was too short.

Now, in addition to mounting the CPU and heatsink on the bootm for coool air, this case was designed around a "tunnel" to cool the CPU directly. It came with a 120mm fan in the front and a 120mm fan in the rear, and a plastic, clip on shield that connects the two with the CPU/heatsink inside. I could not attach this due to the 4pin wire routing issue. This is doubly disappointing as I wanted to see if this tunnel would actually get the 9500 to perform like the $60 piece of copper it is. I will be replacing the 9500 today and so will not have an oppurtunity to test that as I don't want to take it all apart a 3rd time once I get the cable extender just to see if the tunnel shaves another degree or 2 from the Zalman 9500. I will be replacing it with a Noctua NH-U12 with a 120mm Thunderblade 78CFM fan. Hopefully, that with this case gets me under 50c at current speeds so I can make another attempt for 4Ghz on air. Or at least get back up to 3.96 even in the summer.

The last point for this case is good or bad greatly depending on your point of veiw.

Tool-less drive bays and PCI slots.

Personally, I could take or leave tool-less drive bays. They are neat, but they can cause problems, as they do in this case. I have a front panel light bus that I can not easily attach in one of the bays due to the utter lack of mounting holes. It's tool-less, or it's not going in. Since this case is obviously marketed to the special interest market, and not the casual computer user, the consideration of front bay buses and other add-ins should have been addressed as they are quite common. The tool-less PCI slots work flawlessly. Another benifit to the upside down ATX design.....I can see the cool graphics and design on my video card.

EDIT:In addition to the tool-less drive bays, they made the fans tool-less!! Yup, the two 120mm fans (1 in front as intake and 1 in rear as exhaust) require no screws or removal of any other componants. they slide in from the side and clip into place in plastic frames. There is also an optional 80mm fan mount in the front that is also tooless.

Now, the final thought, and the main reason I bought this case.

How does it cool? Afterall, that's the name of the company, AreoCool, and all the downsides to this case arrise directly from it's design for better cooling. This is why I did not sleev my PSU, or replace my heatsink. I wanted to test and see what kind of a difference just the case made.

The answer?


In my old case, with 32-34c ambient case temps (measured from the NVIDIA control panel) I would get full load temps of 61-62c.....and that was with the side panel off. In the Spiral Galaxies I get almost the same temps, 58-60c full load......but that's with the side panel on! Removing the side panel actually does little to the CPU temps but raises the board temps 1-2c. So while it didn't make a big difference cooling wise (I was hoping for 5-7c drop) it did at least make my tower look respectful and clean. Having your side panel off is a little ghetto.

So technically, it is cooling better, and that is without the tunnel and with the stock fans. Definatly worth the money as it looks much better than the Mutant X and it is cooling better.


Final conclusion: Awesome case, looks great, good cooling design, and has lots of room. Five 5.25 bays, two floppy bays, and room for 5 hard drives. But you will want to order a 4pin cable extender and have longer hard drive cables or else install will be tricky or impossible.



I give it 4 flames out of 5.

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ELmo1989

Nice review and love the case
really love the tunnel with the cooler.

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Thumper

Thanks, I am super happy with the case. I also forgot to mention (and I will edit the original post), the two 120mm fan mouonts are clip ins, no screwing or removing of front panel at all. They just slid in and out from the side. There is also a 80mm mount in the front, above and to the left of the 120mm....it is also a clip in mount.

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Thumper

UPDATE:


Got my new heatsink last week (wrote a review of it in the Intel Air Cooling section).....and some Thunderblades from Allen to replace the stock case fans.

Now the case looks even more awesomeAWESOME


Before;





After;

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