Review Date: 15th March 2002 Reviewed By: Clinton "SileNceR" Warburton Product: Aopen KF45A Case w/ 250W PSU Rating: 68% Manufacturer: Aopen Purchased from: Scorpion Technology

The case

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Here is the case in its shipping box. The box is attractive as one can expect a corrugated cardboard box to be, and the case itself is protected by two moulded pieces of polystyrene foam (which is a fantastic addition to the environment... *snigger*) and a large plastic bag. The foam fits tightly into the box and as such it can be quite a task to get the case out of the box on one's own. Lucky I had someone to help :)

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Here is the case outside its box. A little bland perhaps, and beige, although it goes without saying that this case could quite easily be modded (a little more on this later). The case is a mid-tower, as stated in the specification, and contains 3 5.25" drive bays, 2 3.5" external drive bays, and only one internal 3.5" bay. The lack of a larger amount of internal bays concerns me, if I were to purchase this case for my own personal use it would either be for a file server or a LAN box, and either way it would have more than the one hard drive in it. The similarly small amount of external 5.25" bays may be a hindrance to some of you also, especially if you have something along the lines of the following in mind - A DigiDOC 5, SBLive! Audigy Platinum EX, DVD, CD-RW. As you can see, for these componants to be used either you need to do some serious modding, or you need to buy a case with more than 3 5.25" drive bays. The two external 3.5" bays are a normal thing with most cases, the exception generally being Full tower cases, which often have 3. The main problem with these bays is that as need for space for hard drives increases in this case these bays may end up being filled internally, removing the usefullness of them. Of couse, this also implies that if you needed more space for hard-drives that you could use the external bays without removing the covers.

The front of the case also has a stylish swirl-like extruded edge on the right hand side. The swirl is a different texture to the rest of the case, which may be a bonus to you or a hindrence, depending on wether you would intend to paint the case. It also means that a front placed blowhole will not look best centered and may need to be set off to the left a little, as discussed later in the possible mods section.

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Here is the back of the case, where you can see the positioning of the power supply, among other things. In some early mid tower ATX cases the power supply was mounted directly over the top of the cpu cooler which posed problems for many users trying to install high profile cooling fans into their cases. Fortunately Aopen have adopted the normal placement of the PSU for the KF45a. Also note the 2x 60mm fan holes. While it would have been preferrable to see the back plate of the case altered to support a 120mm fan in that area (looking at the picture you can see there would have been room), the 60mm mounts should work fine providing you're not trying to cool the world's hottest system in this case.

More on the back of the case later when we take a closer look.

Ok, lets disassemble the case and take a look at the internals.