Test System

Assembly

Installing the motherboard on the ATX side is best done by placing the chassis down flat on its side. As you can see, the CPU cooler touches the chassis, but fits with a little love. While any normal user should really consider sticking to the 155 mm space constraints for air cooling, we wanted to benchmark thermals and noise with our default setup. Adding the SFX-L PSU bears no surprises with the exception of the cables being too short, so I had to invest a couple of bucks to buy extensions. This may be an issue for most SFX-L PSUs as these smaller units are meant to be installed into small cases.


Once everything on the ATX side is assembled, you can see how I managed to route the cable with big zip ties for the most part. While FSP does supply sticky pad-equipped ones, those tend not to hold that well unfortunately. Regardless, the result is quite good, but I should have really invested a little extra time into tidying up the PSU cables. This is definitely my fault and not that of the chassis!


Before getting into the assembly process for the ITX components, I chose to go for the storage elements. You have to remove a single screw and flip the tray upward to pull it out for assembly. This means that you will have to remove both 3.5" trays if you want to get the bottom tray out if filled, for example. This could be quite annoying in a full system where the plugs are between the two units.


Once free, you may simply screw the drive of your choice down and insert the full contraption into its slot at an angle before screwing it down, at which point it holds in place firmly.


Adding an SSD is done in the exact same way, but here, the angle with the slimmer drive is enough, so you don't have to remove the tray above it to get it out. Once you have filled the tray and secured the drive with classic screws it can go straight back where you grabbed it from.


Taking a look at the backside of the ITX half, you can see where the cables connect. While I totally get that all the excess cables live in the space between both halves, if FSP had employed something like hot-swap connectors with pre-attached power and data leads, you would have been able to swap drives out easily without taking both halves apart.


Just like on the main side, adding the motherboard for the ITX system is done with the use of spacers and screws. However, this unit is flipped, and adding any kind of gaming GPU means sacrificing the bottom 3.5" storage tray. Due to the smaller motherboard, you may install an ATX PSU on this side.


With everything installed on the ITX side, you can see that things are quite clean on the outside again, with any cable mess hidden nicely in the space between both halves.


Joining the two made me feel a little like Dr. Hyde joining two halves of a brain. As I had feared, lining the 40 mm spacers up to be exactly level to the holes on the ITX side was a bit frustrating, but I managed with a bit of tough love and loosening things on the ATX side.


With everything assembled on the ITX side, the last thing to do is to attach the glass panel with the cool FSP logo.


The same holds true for the ATX side, but once again, the glass ended up touching the top of the be quiet! cooler. That said, the assembly was a success.

Finished Looks

With all the components ready and the two halves attached, I expected the RGB element to light up brightly, just like in the marketing images. However, those make it look like this element is translucent and has much stronger luminance. In fact, the whole setup is vastly different from what we saw at Computex 2019.


Looking at the system from the front, there is a small blue LED that lights up to let you know your system is up and running, with the gray aluminium flaps hiding any boring fans or liquid cooling system nicely while giving them all the air they could need.


Considering an SFX unit is 125 mm wide and an ATX variant is just 150 mm, that is a 25 mm difference on each side for a total of 50 mm. I think FSP could have fitted two ATX units on the backs next to each other with just a little size adjustment considering the already present 40 mm. The additional 5 mm of space could have been created by simply offsetting the exterior fold of the floor by that much. The power button of the ITX system in the back lights up the same as the one on the front to let you know it is up and running as well.