A Closer Look - Outside

Take a look at the Hadron Air right out of the box and you will notice another layer of protection on the smooth front. There is no reason to peel it off until you have finished assembling your new system, but we will rip it right off to give you the proper shots below.


There is no drive bay at the front of the Hadron Air. The only functional aspect is a square power button. One can see the included 80 Plus Gold PSU on the bottom of the rear, while the area above it is solely used for the ITX motherboard, though no fan will fit in the rear because of its compact size. The Hadron is constructed to allow for both side panels to be removed. The main panel has a large window that allows you to see everything inside the chassis. While this is pretty cool, a case of this size does not offer any proper cable management, so some might like to hide the mess inside from view. The other side only has an air vent on the bottom.


As there is no drive bay at the front of the chassis, the only other interesting tidbit is the EVGA logo there, but the latter goes under a bit because of the front panel's shiny nature. I wonder whether a lit up EVGA logo would have been cooler instead, but such extras really boil down to cost, not the impossibility of including them.


The bottom half of the rear is where the magic happens. The Hadron Air comes with a 500W, 80 Plus Gold certified 1U power supply. These units are normally used in rack-mounted servers and tend to be noisy, so it will be interesting to see how this one fares. Above it are the two motherboard expansion slots. Installed GPUs are secured outside of the chassis to keep the chassis as compact as possible. There is nothing functional in the top half; that is, besides the cutout for the motherboard and two openings for an external liquid-cooling setup.


The I/O consists of two USB 3.0 and the usual pair of Audio plugs on the side of the chassis. Above that is a slot-loading slimline drive bay, which is a great little sight to see in a chassis of this size. Its only downside is the limited availability of appropriate drives it can be fitted with. EVGA explicitly mentions that the Hadron Air was designed to hold the Panasonic UJ8C5 Slot Load Optical Drive, a pretty scarce unit. Only one retailer sells the unit in bulk over Germany's Amazon Marketplace. There aren't very many slimline slot-loading Blu-ray drives out there, and all of them cost 150 euros or more. Nor does their eject buttons line up with that of the Hadron Air. An actual slimline bay would have been better, allowing users to go for a drive of their choice instead.


EVGA placed two 120 mm fans into the ceiling of the chassis. These push hot air out the top of the unit and should do a good job in keeping things cool inside this compact enclosure.