PC Case Disperses Plenty Of Hot Air

To optimize heat removal, the Nine Hundred case has a large 200x30mm fan that sits beneath the top cage. In addition, two 120x25mm TriCool fans are connected at the two front hard drives cages, and a fourth fan is located in the rear. All four fans have three speeds and provide enough air pressure to keep the motherboard and CPU cool.

The Nine Hundred arrives with a power supply bay at the bottom of the case, which also allows air to freely flow upward. The Test Center used an EVGA Nvidia NForce 680 SLI motherboard with 2 Gbytes of memory and an Nvidia GEForce 8800 GTX graphics card. Three hard drives also were installed, two of which were speedy 15K Seagate SAS drives. After several hours of operation, the Intel stock CPU cooling system and the memory were merely warm to the touch.

Even though this case provides plenty of air flow, it does not have nearly enough space between the hard drives and the internal cards. For example, the clearance between the top hard-drive cage and the Nvidia graphics card was too tight to install a hard drive at the bottom of the cage. The SATA drive could only be placed at the top, while the other two drives had to be installed toward the bottom of the second cage. This arrangement provided enough spacing for the graphics card and an Adaptec 3405 internal RAID card.

The top of the case comes with a storage tray, including USB, FireWire and audio ports. The storage tray is a good place to keep USB keys and CDs, but because the top of the case is exposed to the unit's large fan, it is not recommended to place anything spillable in the tray area.