Raidmax Viper Case

Installation

Installation of the motherboard was a breeze, as you would expect. There is ample space to work with cables and the cable management holes are placed in logical spots. One issue that I ran in to was CPU cooler clearance with the side panel. This should not be a problem for most as this case will fit all but the very tallest coolers (such as my Cooler Master V8).

Unfortunately, installing the rest of the system was not quite as hassle-free as the motherboard. The first issue I ran into was with the hard drive cage. For some reason my hard drive would not fit in to the bottom slot, and only barely squeezed into the next up. From what I could tell, it was caused simply by poor build quality either in the stamping of the cage or riveting it to the case. Also, the tool-less mounting system turned out to be fairly poor as just screwing the drive in would have been nearly as quick and would have held the drive better. My second complaint is that while the front panel supports USB 3.0, no USB 2.0 adapter was included, making the front ports useless on all but the newest motherboards. My final qualm with this case is that there is simply not enough space behind the motherboard tray to make routing cables much thicker than SATA easily achieved. I ended up having to shove virtually everything behind the HDD cage. Fortunately, the included cable management holds came in handy and worked very well.

With everything installed and the system booted up, we can finally get a look at the case lighting. I personally found the blue to detract from the black and orange but a few others who saw it liked the color scheme so that is purely preference, and of course different fans can always be installed. Everyone, however, agreed that the side panel fan was a bit too bright, easily lighting up a dark room.

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