iStarUSA Nitro AX

I gather up my hardware, plop myself on the floor, slap this thing on its side and prepare to go to town. I pull out the motherboard tray, which is nicely seated and held on by two thumb screws, notice the handles, and install the motherboard. The other hardware all installs nicely and nothing seems out of the ordinary. WAIT!! How do I install my CD Burners, my DVD burners, my big honking temp displays!?!? This thing uses rails, but there aren’t any in the box? OK, now I am mad! I have every thing sitting on my floor ready to get it on and I can’t install an optical drive?!? I hop on the internet, look for their phone number and think to myself, “This can’t be true?” I give them another chance and start looking through the box thinking I might have missed something, and of course I did. It wasn’t in the box though; they pulled a fast one on me. They hid the rails on the inside of the case on each of the drive bay covers. Nice feature / annoying feature. This seems to be covered in the manual that was somehow not included with my review sample.

With all the pieces accounted for, the assembly can take place. The motherboard tray, with its handles, makes things much easier. It removes easily, but reinstalling the tray into the case with a motherboard installed on it can be quite tricky. It seems that they didn’t allow enough room to install the tray and motherboard easily because of the exhaust fan location. With a little finagling I was able to re-introduce the tray into the chassis without removing the fan. I would, however, recommend removing the fan first though as it would make the installation much easier. This issue could have easily been solved by make the chassis just a hair longer. If you look closely in the picture, you can see that there is only about the width of the thumbscrew between where the motherboard tray and the non-removable hard drive rack of the chassis. That width is not enough to compensate for the width of the 120mm exhaust fan.