More on the Exterior

Behind the new bezel door, you get the same drive expansion bays as with the older series. You have 4 x 5.25" drive bays and also 2 x 3.5" drive bays. The difference here is the covers that's used to conceal the bays. It comes with an area for your thumb and inderx finger to grip onto and pull the cover out. It's a nice feature to have and makes installing your drives a little easier. It's also surprisingly easier to clip on back onto the case, unlike the previous bay cover design. Some of you won't have all 4 bays occupied and how the covers blends with your drives is a matter of personal preferences.

As usual, the POWER and RESET buttons are situated on the right side of the 3.5" bays, so as the Power and HDD LEDs. This time, Chieftec uses a Blue LED for Power! w00t! Like the older models, the door on the BX Series can be locked to prevent unauthorized used. Although I'm not too keen on the "Pointing Finger" image on the door. Kinda cheesy. Heheh! I guess you can always Bondo over it eh? :O)

Chieftec first introduced the front USB, Firewire and Audio Ports in their Matrix Series and also the revision of the Dragon series. While it was a nice addition, I never liked the position the ports were in, smack right in the middle of the lower portion of the bezel. Most other cases have theirs on the lower portion and with the new BX Series, Chieftec wises up and places the ports on the bottom portion of the bezel, hidden behind a small swing door. Chieftec also colour coded the cables for the front ports for easy identification. The codes are as follows;

• Black for USB 2.0

• Blue for 1394 (Firewire)

• Yellow for Audio Jacks

Exchangeable Bezel Pieces

As I've mentioned earlier, the new BX Series features removable bezel pieces that you can mix and match with any of the 8 different colours available. Chieftec also included a removable and washable filter on the lower portion of the bezel. This helps to keep dust out of the case and keeps it clean. But in order to remove the filter, the whole front bezel has to be removed from the case structure. Kinda troublesome if you ask me. The inner portion of the removable pieces have large holes in them to facilitate with the cooling of the case interior.

Chieftec replaces the 80mm side fan port with a 92mm one on this BX Series but did not maintain the speaker grill fan guard from the previous model. Instead, the new 92mm fan port is punched out with numerous honey-combed shaped opening. Even the two rear 80mm fan ports have these new pucnh outs designs. I still prefer the old one where the openings are much larger, thus more air can flow thru it and have less turbulence. Another 92mm fan port is also added to the other side of the case, blowing directly on the first HDD cage. Some of us have more than 3 hard drives and that 4th one may need cooling as well.

Now that you've seen much of the outside, let's get inside the case....