iStarUSA Nitro AX

Up front you have room for five 5.25″ drives and two 3.5″ exposed drives. There is a beautifully molded mesh grill guarding your fingers from the fan that sits in front of the internal hard drives. If you look carefully at the front of this chassis you will notice a nice little notched out area that gives you USB, FireWire, and Audio connectors for your convenience. iStarUSA gives you greater versatility with this control center because this control center can be turned 90 degrees to accommodate you and your placement.

I am somewhat disappointed that iStarUSA chose to only provide us with a partial aluminum bezel instead of going all out with a full aluminum bezel. This normally wouldn’t be an issue for me, but when the chassis pulls $100.00 + out of your wallet, I think they should at least minimize the use of plastic; plastic bezels just feel cheap to me. Along with the partial aluminum bezel is an aluminum door that hides your optical drive. This door flips down when your drive opens. It’s a decent idea, if you have a CD/DVD drive that doesn’t match the color of your case, but I think it is poorly implemented here; the door actually inhibits the opening and closing of the drive with three drives that I tested. I would rather have had no door at all than this one.

So, I pull off the side panel, pull out the box of stuff included with the case, and start looking around. No complaints thus far. They provided a removable motherboard tray, which I love. They also included removable racks for 5 internal 3.5″ drives that aren’t too far away from the motherboard. These trays are already fitted with rubber grommets to eliminate noise due to vibration, and they route the basic cables for me. The distance between the drives is more than enough to route your cables through when you have some drives installed. Nice, it looks like there is plenty of room for my PSU installation. Thanks, because I am sick of scratching up my aluminum or chrome PSU’s trying to shove them into tiny places.