Summary and Conclusion:
Overall, the case does exactly what you would want in a case, and that is to keep your components cool and, as a bonus, make them look good. My experiences with the board shorting out due to the power supply bracket and the motherboard screws did somewhat dampen my spirits regarding the case. Because of those short coming, I will not be recommending this case for an award. In the future, while I liked the idea of thumb screws to mount the mother board and a tool less design for the power supply, I would stress that its not always a great idea to reinvent the wheel. Overall, despite the short comings regarding the electrical shorts, I would recommend this case to other people, but on the stipulation that they have the extra mounting screws to replace the faulty parts. One of the things I really like was the 2 zone design of the case which I felt really help make the case very presentable, and it definitely added significantly to the cooling capability by both separating the hard drive heat source and helping to limit, if not remove, cable clutter.
 |
 |
I never saw any issues with shorts, do not see how the standoffs on the mobo or using the thumb screws instead of regular screws would cause a short, nor could i see how an electrical short could result from the use of the power supply mounting bracket, that is very very strange.
-I would not call this case perfect either, the bottom hard drive bracket is too close to the power supply, causing cable cramp, and it is also not perforated, whereas the hard drive cage at the top in the upper zone is perforated, which means that your bottom mounted hard drives are not getting properly cooled.
-The area at the top is too hard to work with, getting 8 pin power installed is difficult because there is little clearance with the motherboard and the wall between the upper zone and main zone.
-The hole in the motherboard tray for the behind the cpu access is nice too, but….there is no cover, so you just have a huge hole in the motherboard tray.
-The cable routing holes are not the best aligned in the world and could be wider to give more room, and there are no rubber grommets to seal them like in the Corsair cases.
-I know a lot of people use their cases usb/ports clusters, but I usually do not and either way there are a lot of cables to have to store or route, making the area in the upper zone very cluttered with a lot of cable bulk, proving difficult to install multiple 5.25″ bay devices.
-The cable routing in the back, while nice, could use a bit more room between it and the case cover, I would say it is not quite deep enough.
-The supplied tool-less expansion card mounting system is OK, but i found it too hard to use when you wanted to remove/add cards frequently, you have to get the card situated just right to fit under the holder, but fortunately, this is removable.
-The case is too expensive.
On the plus side, there is great direct cooling right on system components from the three front 120mm fans. I replaced these with more powerful fans as the supplied 120mm fans while silent i found didn’t push enough air. The case is not too loud. I would also liked to have see individual fan controllers as well, not just the one master controller. Sometimes i wonder if these case manufacturers ever work with their own cases to build systems.
I never had any problems with electrical shorts either, it must be your houseplug that’s not properly grounded. otherwise your components may be defectice.
Nice review, besides talking about issues that has nothing to do with the chassis and by that giving it bad reputation.
Buy this chassis, expensive – so what, if you have the money to spend on it, it’s worth it
I thoroughly tested this case before post the problem with the electrical short. while this short may not be present in all the cases in production it was present in the model I reviewed.
This case was tested using 2 different motherboards, 2 different power supplies and on different circuits. Both motherboards and power supplies that I used to verify that there was indeed an issue are stable boards that are actively in use.
I had no problems at all with electical shorts. The included fans were better than I had expected, as well as cooling. The X900 cools as good as my Silverstone FT02, but with less noice. Maybe I got a slight revision of the case, as my bottom harddrive cage has holes for a SSD-drive.
Compared to the X1000, the X900 has reinforced sides, as well as better quality fans. This, along with the nice side-window makes it a good buy. There is always a price for design and quality.