What’s In The Box?
Upon opening up the case, I thought I was missing the usual accessories. With further investigation, I noticed a little black box tucked underneath the HDD cage. Pulling it out and cracking it open revealed all of our “missing” accessories. This included:
- Motherboard standoffs and miscellaneous screws
- Toolfree optical drive / HDD bay rails
- Motherboard speaker
- Instruction manual
The trend seems to be more companies building in spare parts bins into their cases. Often times, cases come with hardware bits that don’t seem to be universal. By having storage inside the case, we don’t have to throw them out by accident or lose them.
First Impressions
After unwrapping all of the protective packaging, I set my eyes on a very attractive case. Surrounding the front, top, and rear of the case is a 6mm thick Aluminum bezel painted in what appears to be a powdercoat blue, a color more associated with a high end car that with a computer case. The front reveals a power and reset button up top, along with the Power and HDD activity light. There was also a Spire and Pininfarina logo etched on the front of the case. It looks like Pininfarina took a minimalist approach in their case by hiding many of the eyesores of your typical case and greeting you with an elegant yet functional design. It was gorgeous!
Opening the main front panel reveals the 3-optical drive bays and two 3.5” drive bays. One thing to note was how easy it was to open the panel even with a magnetic latch. Another thing I noticed was how flimsy the plastic hinge on top / screw hinge on the bottom seemed to be. If I’m not careful, I could easily break off this panel.
One of the unique features associated with this case has to be the upper front section. Lifting up this section (which requires the use of both your hands) reveals one Firewire and two USB slots as well as your standard headphone and mic jack. To close this section, you need to stick your hand underneath and push in the piece that holds it open. Unique as this may be, it is also a little clumsy if you need to open / close this frequently. Again, if I’m not careful when I’m lifting this case, I could accidentally grab this panel and tear if off of the case. Then our gorgeous case would no longer be so gorgeous.
Now, the next unique feature is the flip down side panels. Pull up the latch on either side and the side panels flip down: No tools required here! This kind of reminds me of the flip up doors of many exotic supercars, such as the Pininfarina designed Ferrari Enzo. This is also reminiscent of the Apple Tower Systems. One of the side panels also includes a height adjustable CPU exhaust funnel for channeling hot air directly out of the case.
On the rear of the case, you get a 120mm exhaust fan, power supply slot up top, several screw in expansion slot covers, and a standard motherboard I/O panel. The rear panel is also removable to gain access to the fan.
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