Assembly

Installing the motherboard within the Strike-X chassis is done with the included spacers. Aerocool mentions a maximum length of 295 mm for the graphics cards, which in turn also means that you will not be able to use any of the bays next to the cards. Even with GPUs shorter than this, there is simply no way one can use these. In reality the maximum length in combination with a full bay is probably somewhere around 250 mm. While the large Phanteks cooler does fit, it is quite close to the top of the chassis. In the end, most coolers - including 120 mm tower variants should have enough room within the Strike-X chassis.


You will have to secure both 3.5 or 2.5" drives on the trays with the supplied screws. Once attached, simply slide the unit into place. As you can see, a 3.5" drive extends well beyond the wall of the bay itself. This is due to the front fans, as they take up a bit of space. By removing these, you should be able to slide the hard drive tray in further. Black pointy screws are used to hold these plastic parts in place as the locking mechanism cannot be used here.


There is a spot for an SSD on the floor of the chassis, but you can only screw it down with two of the four holes, as the feet below the chassis cover the rear openings.


Installing an ODD is quite simple and does not require any tools. Just detach the lock and slide the drive into place. Then put the plastic parts back where they belong. Due to space restrictions, the very top and very bottom bay do not have this feature, thus I installed a drive into the top two bays. The plastic locks work quite well and holds the drive securely.


Placing the PSU within the system is done by traditional means. Four screws hold the unit in place and there is plenty of space for long and powerful variants.


With everything installed, there is still a bit of a cable mess. This is simply due to the fact, that I did not route every cable behind the motherboard tray. There is not enough space to squeeze every cable through here and close the side panel successfully as well.

Finished Looks

Once everything is in place and the system is turned on, the Strike-X Advance does make a pretty cool impression. Considering that the chassis is geared towards budget gamers, which do not tend to fill their case with a high-end SLI or CrossFire rig as I have done in this review, the looks make up for some of the internal shortcomings.


As you can clearly see, I have routed the USB 3.0 cable through the water cooling hole in the back. I strongly suggest you ask your local retail which version they are offering, as one with an internal USB 3.0 header would be much better. The tiny power LED in the top of the chassis lights up blue - which seems a bit out of place.