Computing on Demand PC News & Reviews
Inside the GX700 is pretty much standard. The motherboard tray features a large cutout for easy access to your CPU cooler. All the popular motherboard sizes are supported. Unfortunately, the motherboard tray does not have indicators for where your motherboard standoffs should go, a small oversight on the part of Antec. There are plenty of cutouts for cable routing and thankfully there are no sharp edges exposed.
Although we had mentioned that there are four 5.25″ drive bays, only three of them are technically useful. The top bay is unusable due to the top mounted fan switch and connectivity panel. This unusual oversight has me wondering why they even bothered to put a removable panel there in the first place. Each of the bays feature a plastic locking mechanism for quick installation and the locks are sturdy enough to endure repeated use.
The HDD rack has room for five internal hard drives in total. Each of the trays has the ability to mount either a full 3.5″ hard drive or a 2.5″ hard drive (for you SSD enthusiasts out there). If you plan on using full size hard drives, these drive trays are tool-less and have three points on each side for HDD mounting. Oddly enough, in my opinion, Antec chose to face things the wrong way! Your mileage may vary… In order to install or remove your hard drives, you have to remove both side panels because the trays release to the far side.
Hardware installation is a breeze. The large interior gives you plenty of room to work and the nearly tool free design means installing components like hard drives and optical drives is quick and painless. There is plenty of room for over-sized PSU’s and over-sized video cards. Cable routing is easy thanks to the tie down points on the back of the motherboard tray and the number of cable cutouts.
The cables for connectivity are plentiful and nearly all of them are long enough. The exception is the HD audio cable, which seems to be a hair to short on nearly every case I review lately.
Additionally, although the chassis can support six fans in total, the fan controller only supports controlling 4 of them.
