A Closer Look - Outside

The NOX Xtreme Coolbay CX sports a very simple look with soft corners and straight edges. In terms of materials, the rubberized finish can be found on all its plastic parts, but as there is a lot of metal mesh, the front cover extends about an inch above the rest of the chassis, which is also the only extraordinary aspect of NOX Xtreme's design.


As I mentioned before, there is lots of metal mesh since the entire front essentially consists of nothing else. Looking at the rear, it becomes apparent that the motherboard within will be installed horizontally.


The chassis actually comes with a window on each side panel, so curious onlookers should be able to look into the Coolbay through either side, which will put your GPU on one side and the memory, CPU, and CPU cooler on the other on display nicely. Both windows have a slight tint, which makes the chassis a bit more forgiving with a messy interior.


Taking a closer look at the front, you will find a little NOX logo in the bottom-right corner.

Interestingly enough, all their promotional graphics show the chassis with a larger logo in the middle instead. The 5.25" drive bay above comes with a simple, solid cover.


You will find the PSU bay in the bottom-left of the rear. As we will see in a bit, the 2.5" hard drives are to the right of the bay. You may install an 80mm fan here to cool these drives if you like. Moving on up, the top half is used for the motherboard with its four expansion slots, and there is a spot for a 120mm fan as well. The layout allows for big tower coolers of up to 210mm in size. There are also two holes for water-cooling tubes, but the chassis lacks the required rubber grommets for their proper use.


The top has a large metal-mesh cover you may easily remove to reveal the mounting possibilities for two 120mm or 140mm fans. You may also install a liquid-cooling setup of up to 240mm in size into the top, but doing so will get in the way of the 5.25" drive bay. The I/O can be found on that little piece extending past the ceiling in the front. It consists of a SD/micro SD-card reader, a single USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports, and the usual audio plugs. While it is great to see the inclusion of a card reader, the choice to go for a single USB 3.0 plug was definitely not the right one on NOX Xtreme's part.