A Closer Look - Inside

To gain access to the interior, simply pull the panels off. No locks or screws hold them in place. While this works and makes assembly incredibly easy, it also leaves your system completely unprotected at a LAN party.

The entire frame is lined with foam to eliminate any vibrations loose panels might generate. Even though all four panels are made of aluminum, the interior frame consists of steel which has been painted black. The overall quality of the internal structure is great, but also makes the chassis a bit heavier than variants out of nothing but aluminum.

As you can see, all interior compartments of the chassis are easily accessible once the three case panels are removed. Pulling the front cover off will also reveal the second 140 mm fan. Having such a push/pull system within the chassis is certainly nice.


You would install SSD drives into the bottom compartment as it contains two spots for 2.5'' drives. You will have to tip the chassis on its side to fasten the drives to the bottom with screws. In addition to those storage units, the PSU will also be placed here. Cooltek has completely separated this compartment from that of the motherboard, which should help a bit with cable management and thermals.


The HDD cage in the top compartment can hold four 3.5" storage units. Instead of a simple hole in the floor of this compartment, there are two rubber grommets, which allows you to route cables from one area into the other.


The W1 comes with the slimline ODD bay bracket by default, which allows you to place such a drive into the chassis right out of the box. If you do not require such a drive, you may replace it with the flat piece I mentioned in the beginning. Its shape is essentially the same as that the chassis comes with by default, but Cooltek did not bend it into shape, leaving it void of any protruding elements. Use this bracket and you may install two 120 mm or 140 mm fans here instead.


The motherboard tray in the rear is nothing out of the ordinary, and the same goes for the 140 mm fan. It does come with a sleeved cable, which is a nice touch as it keeps things clean within the case.


All he I/O elements and the fan controller utilize the black PCB, which is a great choice. But a bit of functional cheating is going on as the USB 3.0 plugs are essentially just cables that have been wedged onto the PCB. The result is actually a far better approach than soldering connectors to the circuit board as a cable is far less likely to become defective and can easily be swapped out by even a novice system builder.


The fan controller allows you to attach up to three 3-pin fans to it, while a SATA power cable is used to feed them with current. All the cables within the W1 are sleeved black, including the I/O cables with default connectors.