A Closer Look - Inside

How to access the interior should be clear if you assembled the InWin Explorer. Simply pop the four push pins holding each panel in place and take them off their frames. You are left with unobstructed access on both sides, which is also how you are meant to install all your parts. The I/O PCB is fully exposed to the windowed side, which is unfortunate as there is no way to hide it from view. InWin could have simply folded the metal the other way and designed the PCB accordingly. That way, the bare side would have been hidden from view.


The aforementioned metal tray in the floor is mainly used for the ITX motherboard. Funnily enough, there is a cutout in it, which is usually there for the user to access the CPU cooler mounting plate without removing the board. Naturally, that is not the case in the InWin Explorer, which suggests that the tooling for the floor plate has its origin from somewhere other than this chassis design. A fan is right above where you would find such an opening in relation to the board in most cases, whether classic ATX towers or cubic like the Explorer.


The front of the floor tray is for either two 2.5" or one 3.5" drive, both of which are meant to be secured through the floor of the InWin Explorer. There are no hooks or any other aids for cable management inside the case, which will make keeping things tidy quite difficult.


The PSU frame in the front of the chassis is offset to the side of the I/O PCB, giving you as much room for long GPUs as possible. InWin opted for ATX here, which is fine as you can always choose to go SFX with a simple mounting adapter. That said, InWin could have walled the frame on three sides and added the ability to install further storage, as well as hooks for further cable routing/management. As it stand now, this area is underutilized. The two screws holding it in place need to be accessed through the space between the frame and ceiling, which will be rather difficult once you have an AIO installed. Easier would have been to access screws through the front of the chassis despite having to remove the front cover to get to them.


Looking at the ceiling, you can easily see where you are meant to install 120 or 140 mm fans. Also noteworthy is a manufacturing blemish on all edges of the plastic top and floor parts, which is present at the same spot on both. It could be that the injection mold consists of multiple identical pieces which are then separated from each other at those points.


All the cables within the InWin Explorer are sleeved black and will work just fine on modern ITX motherboards. Even the case leads have been unified into a single plug, so you no longer have to fiddle around with individual one or two-pin cables.