Installation

Installation was straight-forward and there was ample room to work inside the case. The stock I/O and PCI plates had to be broken out, so care was taken when working around the sharp edges. Since the drives do not have tool-less locking mechanisms, they needed to be installed the old-fashioned way with screws. This required both side panels to be removed, and this is where having thumbscrews on both side panels was a nice feature. When adding expansion cards to the system there are actually holes in the edge of the case that the screw driver slides through. I have seen other cases where the manufacturer made this area thinner instead, but that reduces the rigidity of the case and usually makes the screwdriver work at an angle. The down-side to this method is that a longer screwdriver is needed, and ratcheting or shorter screwdrivers will not work here.

Finished Look

Since the optical drive is covered and the large fan takes up the side panel, when everything is assembled in the case it does not look any different than when it was empty. With the system powered on the front lights up with the blue LEDs, and so does the side fan.

Performance

To see what kind of difference can be made with such a large fan in the side panel, the system was tested at idle with the fan on and with it off. Room temperature was kept at 26˚C and was measured with a standard mercury thermometer. System temperatures were monitored using SpeedFan 4.32.

With the side fan on there was an 8˚C temperature difference in the system temperatures, but there was no difference in the CPU temperature. Most users will buy this case thinking it will help lower their CPU temps, but there may actually be little to no difference. However, it should be noted that without the side fan running, the case had no ventilation aside from the fan in the power supply. If XClio chose to add some fans to the front or rear of the case the temperatures may have been much less. The difference also may be greater with an aftermarker CPU cooler, but the Intel stock cooler was used as a reference.