Enermax SpineRex Case Review

The Front Panel

Both panels are attached to the chassis using thumbscrews. The motherboard tray has a huge hole for you to access the backplate of the CPU cooler without having to remove the motherboard from the case, two holes for you to route cables behind it, and several metallic clips for you to fasten cables behind the motherboard tray using cable ties.

Figure 14: Overall look

Figure 15: A view behind the motherboard tray

In Figure 16, you have another overall look inside the case. Expansion cards are fastened to the case using black thumbscrews.

Figure 16: Overall look

We don’t understand why Enermax added only seven expansion slots on this case. The whole point of someone needing a big full-tower case is to have several video cards installed, and, depending on your motherboard, this is only possible if you have eight expansion slots. As you can see in Figure 17, there is more than enough space between the seventh expansion slot and the power supply compartment for adding an eighth or even ninth expansion slot. The motherboard tray doesn’t go all the way down to the bottom panel, showing us that the manufacturer could have easily added support for motherboards bigger than the ATX size.

Figure 17: The manufacturer could have added more expansion slots

The SpineRex supports video cards up to 12.2” (310 mm) long or up to 13.3” (337 mm) long, if the hard drive cage in front of the video card is removed, and CPU coolers up to 7” (178 mm) tall.

Note that the power supply can be installed with either its bottom fan facing up or facing down, so you can decide if you want the fan of your power supply pulling air from inside the case or from outside of it. There is an air filter for the power supply fan, but as already explained, this filter is located between the power supply and the bottom panel, meaning that you need to remove the power supply whenever you want to clean it.

Figure 18: Power supply compartment

The Enermax SpineRex has 11 5.25” external bays and two hard drive cages with four 3.5” bays each, and each hard drive cage takes up three 5.25” bays. Therefore, on its factory configuration the SpineRex has five 5.25” external and eight internal 3.5” bays. Since each hard drive cage is removable, you can change this configuration, though. For example, you can move the hard drive cages to the top or remove one of them in order to get three additional 5.25” bays or to allow the installation of longer video cards.

Figure 19: Disk drive bays

Figure 20: Hard drive cage

The SpineRex doesn’t support 2.5” devices. This is a major problem, since full-tower cases are targeted to high-end users who have an SSD unit or will eventually add one to their systems.