Wire Management:

With the side panel off, we get our first look at what this case offers as far as wire management. The noise dampening foam on the back panel will make routing wires behind tough to do because of the limited space. It will only allow certain connections to be routed behind there due to size limitations. The motherboard tray has been fitted with wire management clips, which will only help if you have wires going to certain areas; if not, then they are rendered useless.

Once the system was installed, you can see the bird’s nest of cables left in the bottom of the case. The wire clips along the side of the motherboard tray were not as useful as anticipated, since running the wires that were not in use through them would look even more ridiculous. They help keep the top I/O wires neat as they ran down to connect in the bottom area of your motherboards, but as far as PSU wires go, they are not much help in tidying up the mess.

Installation:

Test System:

• Abit IP35 Pro
• WD 500GB
• WD Scorpio 320GB
• Zumax 750w PSU
• Nvidia 590
• ASUS CD ROM

With the motherboard spacers already installed, we just had to line up our motherboard and use the provided screws to secure it.

Installing the 3.5″ HDD was easy enough with the tool free HDD slider. You will just need to line up the HDD screw holes with the silver prongs on the side and insert them to fully lock the drive in place.

Installing the PCI cards, was easy with plastic locking mechanisms used on the Prominent 5. Once we had them locked down in place, it felt like they secured our card firmly without much wiggle.

Installing the 5 1/4″ devices was, once again, simple, thanks to the tool-free implementation used. You will just need to slide the tab to the left to release it. Then once the device is inserted, push in the locking mechanism and move the tab back to the right to secure it into place.

Dust Filtration:

The front panel is covered in the really nice dust filtering solution you see above. This is one of the better solutions on the market today, which is always nice to see. This dust filtering solution will go a long way in keeping the majority of dust out of your system.

Next: Air Flow, Noise Dampening, and Conclusion

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