A Closer Look - Inside

On the inside, you have around 25 mm of space on the back of the motherboard tray, which should be plenty to route your cables. Sharkhan also includes a large opening underneath the CPU area of your motherboard for that obligatory access to the CPU cooler backplate.


There are several openings inside the case for cable management, with six to the side of the motherboard. These are fairly large and should make routing easy, but the lack of grommets also means things will not look as clean as they could in the end. The three closest to the front will be covered if you install SSDs here, which basically means E-ATX users will lose access to these mounting possibilities as cable routing will get in the way. On top of that, the cool triangular hooks for zip ties are tiny, which will make it hard to use larger zip ties than those provided.


In the main compartment is a solid metal shroud to hide the PSU and 3.5" drives. Interestingly enough, Sharkhan has chosen to utilize the space here for two 120 mm fan mounts instead of storage, pump/reservoir, or vertical GPU mounting. While cooling capabilities are always welcome, any installed fans here will essentially block access to the bottom edge of your motherboard.


Underneath the shroud are two tool-less 3.5" trays which may also hold 2.5" drives with traditional screws. The area above that is utilized solely for cooling purposes, with the three fans and the ability to install a liquid cooling setup of 360 mm size and 55 mm overall thickness.


The PSU bay in the rear is pretty much standard, with foam tips to eliminate any vibrations. Above it, you will find the seven aforementioned expansion slots, of which the top slot is protected by a reusable cover, while the others are of the "break out and throw out" kind. The 120 mm fan in the very top has a visible ring with embedded LEDs that are also controlled by the embedded switch inside the system.


The ceiling has no further surprises, but you can clearly see the cutouts for fan placements and plenty of space above the motherboard for liquid-cooling elements.


All the cables within the Sharkhan X500 are of the default variety, with a SATA plug for the RGB PCB. Unique are certainly the multi-colored pins for the case power and reset buttons, as well as the activity LEDs. That makes assembly for system integrators easier, which is great, but also adds a speck of color to your build you may not want. All the fans within the front of the case come with Molex plugs, so there is no adjusting their fan speeds, which makes no sense. Sharkhan should really change these to 3-pin headers at the very least. The rear fan, interestingly enough, comes with both a Molex and 3-pin header.