Assembly

There are no surprises installing the motherboard. This is done by simply placing the short spacers in the appropriate locations and securing the board with the included black screws. Upon closer inspection it becomes obvious that there is basically no space left above the mainboard as the OEM coolers almost touches the ceiling fan. This means that you will not only be unable to use large tower coolers - as the case width is too compact, but also cannot install large blow down units either. This does not leave you with many options at all, especially if you value silent operations, as most of such coolers are large with slow rotating 120 or 135 mm fans. The only real solution is to go with a water cooling setup, which is something the majority of users will not go for.


To install the optical drive, one has to remove the front drive bay cover first. This turns out to be a bit more difficult than expected, as you cannot pull off the entire front cover that easily. The top I/O cables do not allow you to do so, as they come pre-routed within the chassis. But, after reaching in there with my hand, I managed to pull the cover out and slide the optical drive into place.


Installing the hard drives is very simple. Just snap the rails unto the drive and slide it into place. As you can see, the connectors are facing away from the open side of the chassis, so that you can nicely route them.


Once everything is installed, you can clearly see that most of the cable mess is hidden nicely below the hard drive or behind the mainboard tray. Thanks to the extrusion of the side panel, one can place all unwanted cables in the latter location. This is certainly a nice touch, considering the overall size of the chassis and it gives you the option to stuff the entire case with hardware and multi-GPU configurations, as the space is not cluttered with cables.

Finished Looks

After placing the panels back unto the chassis and turning things on, the Vulcan makes a good impression. NZXT has done a nice job in placing the handle a bit towards the back of the case, as this results in a balanced case when being carried around.


The front LED lights up orange, and the interior hardware can clearly be seen through the mesh side panel. This opening also allows for noise to escape the chassis and gives way to dust entering the case as well. The top fan also lights up in a sexy orange color - a great change from the usual blue or red themes we have seen as of late.