For this review I will be installing the following into the Akasa infiniti zor.

Before I set about installing anything I decided to rearrange the layout of the front of the case, partly because I could and partly because I was fitting a couple more matching fans kindly supplied by Akasa in the top position, many thanks to Caterina for arranging those, I wanted to move the I/O panel out of the way in case any of the cables fouled / obstructed the fans.

The first thing I did was to remove the fan grill from the top of the case, this was a little tricky as the fixing clips are quite strong but only took a couple of minutes to remove. Once it was out I set about removing the front panel. Removing the front panel was very easy little more than a gentle pull and it came off, you don’t need a great deal of force but enough, its not going to fall off if you bump into the case put it that way.

Once it was off you have access to the filters and drive bays. Once I had removed the front panel and had access to the underside of the top fan mounting point I set about fitting the supplied fans.

The fans I was given were the Akasa 4 Led Quiet Fan, at 17dB each they shouldn’t add much in the way of noise to the overall system.

No surprises here but they fitted perfectly, also as you can see it is clearly ready for a 120x2 radiator as well.

The cover for the fans is a nice simple metal mesh with a plastic surround, once the fans were in it is simply a case of clipping it back in.

Ok the now top fans were sorted it was time to move the front bays around. All the bays are held in place by a tool less retention mechanism, you just squeeze the clips together and they pull out, a simple but effective design used on a lot of cases. Once out you get a much better look at the drive bays and filters etc.

As you can see the fans and filters are attached to the front of the drive cages. The filters are simple to remove as they just clip into place.

Fan filter removed, as you can see nothing fancy but more than capable of stopping dust from getting inside of the case, and washable too, apparently.

After some careful deliberation I decided how I wanted things arranged and fitted the appropriate parts in the appropriate places. Theory being the top front fan should provide cool air to the cpu cooler and the bottom one cool air to the graphics card.

Now all that remained was to arrange the front panel to match the internal layout. The “blanking plates” are screwed to the chassis of the front panel so all that needs to be done is unscrew them rearrange and screw them back in, making sure you get them in the correct place other wise you need to remove them again, this I know from experience DOH!! Once I had got everything in the correct positions it was time to strip down my current set up and transfer it into the Akasa infiniti zor.

The first items I transferred across were the hard drives, these were very easy to fit as they just slide into the cage once the tool less retention mechanism is fitted onto the side of the drive. So that was done and the cages were then slotted into the chassis.

Fitting the optical drive worked on the same principle but the retention mechanism is screwed on ala the hard drive cage below.

Next it was time to install the motherboard, using the diagram I discovered earlier fitting the motherboard pillars was a doddle and all the mounting holes lined up perfectly first time. Once that was screwed down I fitted the graphics card and power supply and started connecting everything up. It was now I realised there isn’t much in the there to aid cable management. I don’t know if that’s what the holes in the side of the drive bays are for but that’s all I really had to try and keep things tidy, which worked reasonably well for the I/O stuff but as is nearly always the case the PSU and data cables seemed to spoil everything.

There is a bit of room above and around the non-windowed side panel side for stashing any unused power cables.

Once that was done it was ready for the windowed panel so I removed the protective polythene from the window and screwed it in place and powered it up. It powered up first time, always a good thing, and the whole of the inside was bathed in a nice blue glow.

I apologise for the following poor quality photo’s but low light = long shutter speeds and no tripod = blurry pictures. Hopefully you get the idea though.

More blue from the front also, all matching as the power and drive LED’s are blue also. The whole thing is pretty quiet little more than a low hum coming from it and looking rather splendid with the blue lights and black with a splash of silver detailing on it.

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