In Win X-Fighter Case Review

Introduction (Cont’d)

In Figure 6, you can see the front panel from X-Fighter. It features four 5.25” bays and two external 3.5” bays for floppy disk drives or memory card readers. The plastic bay covers are meshed, which improves the PC internal airflow. However, behind these covers the case has a metallic cover attached to the chassis that must be broken in order to improve the airflow and make these meshes covers meaningful.

The power button is long and has a series of six red LEDs that “walk” from the center to the extremities when the PC is turned on.

Figure 6: Front panel.

In Win put the reset switch behind the handle available on the front panel. We loved this idea because you won’t be able to hit this switch by accident, as it sometimes happens on other cases.

Figure 7: Location of the reset switch.

The top panel can be seen in Figure 8. You will find there two USB ports, one FireWire port and two eSATA ports, plus the headphones and microphone jacks. The presence of a FireWire port and two eSATA ports (and not only one as usual) is really an advantage; however we think this case could have come with four USB ports. Also the two USB ports are too close to each other, preventing you from installing two “fat” USB devices at the same time.

Figure 8: Top panel.

And finally we have the rear panel, which follows the standard ATX design with the addition of one 120 mm fan (no word on speed or airflow; it uses a three-pin connector so you can install it directly on the motherboard to monitor its speed) and two holes for water cooling hoses (these holes come with rubber covers, so you won’t need to break anything on your case in order to use them). One thing that we noticed was that the metal plate used on the rear panel has live edges around the power supply and motherboard openings, so you have to be very careful while building a PC to not cut yourself here. This case would look even better if In Win painted the rear panel and the interior from this case black.

Figure 9: Rear panel.

Now let’s take a look inside X-Fighter.