Enermax CS-10181 Case Review - Front Bezel Door System
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Enermax CS-10181 Case Review (Black)
Front Bezel Door System:
This is probably my favorite feature of this case. This Enermax CS-10181 comes with the drive door that we've gotten used to seeing lately and as is standard on the Enermax 710 series of cases...
This is a feature I love, especially on a non-standard colored case. There's nothing worse than having a stellar looking black or aluminum case and sticking a beige drive in it to detract from its appearance. The door let's you keep your drives hidden without taking away from its appearance. It also keeps a little dust out which doesn't hurt.
The best part in my opinion, is that Enermax didn't stop there with its door. They went one step further and did what is to me, absolute brilliance. Their door is a two door, well, door. After opening the drive door, you also have the option of swinging the entire front bezel open on another hinge....
This is one of the coolest things I've ever seen on a PC chassis. The bezel swinging open gives you instant, tooless, CONVENIENT access to your drives and your front intake fan filters. There is a solid locking mechanism that snaps securely into place so the door only opens when you want it open. I can't tell you the amount of bezel tabs on normal cases I've broken off or stripped screws of bezel fasteners, this is simply great! How they made sure there is no binding on installed drives when the door is open I have no idea but they did it. Big props to this case for this feature!
There is a key hole on the front of the case as you can see in the images above that has three positions:
In the straight up position both doors are locked and a key is required to open either door. In the horizontal position just the drive door is unlocked and you'll need a key to open the entire front bezel door. In the down position both doors are unlocked and can be opened without the key.
Inside the big bezel door is a knob that when turned prevents the case side from being removed..
This is kind of neat in that when you have the front door locked it's impossible (without breaking something) to access any of your PC's parts without a key. Will this keep a thief from stealing your stuff? Probably not. Will this keep your gear safe from sticky fingers and curious minds at a LAN party? More than likely..
Front Intake Fans:
Now this is something that actually took me a short while to figure out. When I removed the case side I could see that there was a place for two 80mm fans in front behind the hard drive cages, but I couldn't figure out how to get to them. After moving on and opening the front bezel door I saw how to remove the fans. There are actually little racks securely held in place with a rail and a screw that hold each 80mm fan from the front. This is pretty ingenious, especially considering how easy it is to get behind the bezel in this case..
As you can see, removing the fans to access the filter is as easy as removing one screw. Speaking of "one screw", this is it, the only screw required for installation in the entire case. Very nice design here.
Rotating Fan Door:
This is something else that I haven't seen before this series of cases. There is a small rotating "cage", for lack of a better word, behind the case side that houses two fans. I can't even describe it accurately, here's what I'm talking about.
As seen above, this cage on a hinge (hinge is at rear of case) holds two 80mm fans with filters. I have to be honest; when I first saw this in images I thought it was a pretty worthless feature. Only after it arrived and I began using it did I see its real value. For any of you that have or have had blowholes you know what a pain in the rear it is unplugging your fans every time you want to remove your case side. You also know that getting your cables routed so that they're neat and leaving enough slack to unplug the fans with the case side removed is a bit of a pain as well. This design makes it so that you don't have to worry about that anymore. You can run the fan wires along the hinged side and across the PSU rail without them being visible, nor them being required to be moved when rotating this little cage out of your way for PC maintenance.
The location of the fans is also about as logical as it gets. One is positioned above the AGP slot which pushes fresh air across the back of your video card and right at the CPU cooler. The other is located right below the AGP slow pushing fresh air across your GPU cooler. This keeps your video card cool and fresh air supplied to your CPU to assist more than a little bit in keeping your system cool. Overall this is very functional and a nice feature to have included.
Tool-less PCI/AGP Card Locking Device:
"For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction". We've seen some pretty nice features so far so it only makes sense for us to find something that is NOT a nice feature. Enter the PCI/AGP card locking device. This is one of those deals that I'm certain looked great on paper, unfortunately, it didn't transfer to the final product as a good feature. The design is simple. There is a little tab that lifts up and slides to the left allowing you to place your AGP/PCI card into the slot, then the tab slides back to the right and locks down, locking the card securely in place.
That is wonderful, and I must admit that on a standard PCI card it works great. However, once you take an AGP/PCI card where the PCB extends beyond the PCI bracket of the card, you simply cannot slide the locking tab over and rotate it down to lock the card in place. Look at this example, our FIC Radeon 9800 Pro.
As you can see in this image, the PCB of the R9800 video card is extended past the bracket and squarely in the way of being able to slide the tab over and lock it down. This is even more of a pain that it appears because there is no way to put the screw in with the case locking device in the way. You're left with two options at this point. You can remove the entire locking device system and use screws to secure your AGP/PCI cards. The other option is to take a Dremel or other similar tool and cut off the entire right side of the tab for the AGP slot, or any other PCI card slot you'll need for an oversized card.
Probably the thing that annoys me most about this problem is that they obviously took a great deal of time designing this case and did a great job, it is a shame that they overlooked something as simple as this.
Hard Drive Cages:
Moving on to something else we haven't seen before, the hard drive cages. Unlike traditional cases where the hard drives are installed with the same orientation as the CDRoms, etc, in this case they are installed sideways in two racks exclusively for that purpose.
As the above images indicate, the drives easily slide into the racks from the side making drive swapping and installation a breeze. I was a little worried that this would leave us with a messing case as they IDE cables would be exposed, but that proved an unfounded concern. Notice how, with this ABIT IS7's laid down IDE connectors, how the IDE cable neatly lies along the rack and doesn't get in the way at all. You'll also see on the left most picture that the drive rails for the screwless drive installation are stored in the open racks. Nice touch..
Alright, if I don't roll this to a new page all of you bandwidth limited junkies are going to show up at my door looking for a fight! Hit next to check out more features and installation...
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