Recently bought a
Zalman zm-z1 plus for a friend and the side panel is
exactly what you describe, being held on by four screws....what's wrong with that
I mean how else are you gonna secure it?
The drilled holes are additional stress concentration points in the glass, near the corners which are already the most stressed areas of a tempered glass sheet. Then, since side panels add some structural rigidity to these cheap, thin-steel cases, those stress concentration points become load bearing
points as all the forces are transferred from whichever inside edge of the glass panel is contacting the shaft of the screw. At least most cases of that design include plastic/rubber grommets to distribute this extremely focused point-loading over a few more square millimeters of the drilled hole's internal surface:
As long as the tempering process was done with a perfectly finished, chamfered and smoothed hole, the tempering process should leave it plenty strong enough. The issue is that this design is usually only used on the cheapest cases now, where you can practically guarantee that the drilled holes are not carefully chamfered and smoothed off before the tempering process. If you've never seen a tempered glass panel shatter and explode for absolutely no reason whatsoever you'll probably not care as much, but the good news is that poorly stressed glass is most likely to shatter during shipping, rather than when it's sat next to you at your desk.
If you ignore the weakness and risk of the design, the other thing I hold against it is that it looks cheap and ugly.
With a better, steel-edged or steel-framed glass panel, the adhesive holding the metal edge or frame onto the glass distributes the forces along the entire adhesion surface, and there are no uneven stresses or stress concentration points. So the glass panel itself is stronger, and the forces being applied to it by the case aren't an issue - it's a win-win.
@Darksaber - I don't suppose you have any more info on the fans, do you? For $50 even four basic sleeve-bearing 3-pin fans is decent, but if they're BB, rifle, or FDB fans with PWM then that's even more impressive.
