Accessories and Getting Inside

The CS-10182 came with pretty much the standard accessories. Two keys were provided, along with a small baggie of screws/standoff/tie-wraps. P4 HSF mounting standoffs and screws were separated into another baggie, a nice touch. The ATX I/O panel is pretty much a standard one that'll fit most motherboards, though a lot of new motherboards (such as those from Asus) are features a different layout, however most Asus mobos come with a new panel to reflect this.

As mentioned before, you can easily open the front panel. The keyhole again serves a purpose here. Turned all the way up, the lock holds both the door and front panel in place; turned halfway down, only the front panel is held in place, and when the lock is turned all the way down, both the door and front panel can be opened. Both of these swing out to the left, as seen in the picture below. This made for *very* easy access to the front fans and drive bays. Once that's done, you'll see a small black latch on the left side of the front chassis; this latch holds/locks the left side panel into place. Turning this will allow you to remove the side panel. You can choose to lock the left side panel in place this way, preventing people from stealing your stuff. After that's done, you only need to remove two thumbscrews per side to remove the side panels. (The right side panel cannot be locked into place but you'll be hard pressed to remove anything from the case properly just by removing it.)

Accessories.

Front panel swings out easily.

This latch locks the left side in place for security.

Two thumbscrews hold each side panel in place.

In addition to swinging out, you can also completely remove the front panel. Similar to how the front door is removed, when the front panel swings out all the way, it simply slides up and then it is removed. The ease with which the front panel can be removed is something that cannot be ignored; contrast this with the front panels of some other cases which require you to sometimes remove screws and press 6 clips at once to get the thing removed. You'll also notice that the front face placements and their filters are accessed from the front, behind the front panel. Sliding out the left side panel is easy thanks to the handle. Once it's removed, you're treated to the nice interior view, which is partly covered by the blue translucent side fan holder. As mentioned before, the case is a bit longer than previous cases of this type, so there is ample room for you to work inside. This is good, because the motherboard tray is not removeable. A removeable motherboard tray wasn't necessary for me for this case, but it definitely would have made installation easier.

Interior view.

Front panel held in place by plastic latches.

Front panel can be removed from its hinges.

Front door removed from panel.

Removing the side fan holder is pretty intuitive. Pressing in two clips, one on top, and one on the bottom, allow you to swing the fan holder out to the left, towards the back. If you're resting the case on its side, horizontally, the fan holder swings out enough that it won't fall back into place on its own. You can remove the fan holder completely by pressing another clip that sort of hinges it in place. One little attention to detail on the fan holder was the inclusion of foam feet around the points where the fan holder contacts either the chassis or the top of expansion cards. This should not only cut down on the rattle of the fans one may put in the holder, but ensures the fan holder doesn't make a 'hard' contact with your expansion cards. Additionally, the height/length of the foam feet above your expansion cards is adjustable - I believe more attention to detail was given to the fan holder in this case than is given by some other manufacturers for the entire case!

Pressing in the clip to swing out the fan holder.

Depressing the hinge clip allows you to remove the fan holder completely.

Foam feet cushion the fan holder between it and the chassis.

Foam feet above expansion cards are adjustable in height.

Once the fan holder is out the way, you can see truly how much space there is in this case; the extra depth contributes to most of this. You can also see that two filters are provided for the side 80mm fans; this way all of the four intake fans (including the 2*80mm at the front) are provided with washable and reusable filters. As you can tell from the picture below, the 5.25" drives are attached using drive rails; they are not mounted directly to the chassis. As we'll see on the next page, attaching the drive rails and mounting the drives is even easier with the CS-10182 because the rails can be attached without screws.

Ample room within.

5.25" drive bays.

3.5" drives go in sideways, and are at the front near the intakes.

Motherboard tray not removeable.

The 6 internal 3.5" drive bays are mounted in such a way that HDDs must be installed sideways. This has its pros and cons. The good effect is that the drives don't stick out towards the motherboard anymore, and thereby don't block off access or conflict with long expansion cards; the bad side is that IDE or other data cables will have to make a slightly longer trip from the controller interface to the HDD, because the back end of the HDD will be sticking out towards the side. Power cables will have to be similarly adjusted. What really surprised me though, was the fact that HDDs are also mounted using drive rails - so two types of rails are provided, one for 5.25" drives and one for 3.5" drives. The 3.5" rails also attach using a tool-less method. Because of the ease of 3.5" drive installation here, the 3.5" drive cage is not removeable, and I didn't find this to be a problem.

Just above the height of the 2 rear 80mm fans is the crossbar, which adds stability to the case. This, and the folded top edge of the motherboard tray, provide support for the PSU. The PSU itself is attached to the PSU plate mentioned previously, and the PSU plate is then held in place by four screws to the case chassis. The PSU is slid in from the back for installation, and this makes changing out a PSU quite a bit easier. Additionally, there is quite a bit of room between the top edge of any motherboard installed in this case, and the bottom of the PSU, which should aid in installation.

Rear interior view.

PSU plate.

PSU has support from beneath.

Tool-less expansion card installation.

What really amazed me was the system in this case for tool free expansion card installation. Not simply a thumbscrew solution, the system instead uses plastic push-down latches of sort. Basically, you install your AGP/PCI cards normally, but then you push down the plastic pin and turn it to lock it into place, thereby securing the card. It maybe wasn't as good as using screws, but I found to be secure enough that I wasn't worried about my cards coming out of place while moving this case.

The USB and firewire wires for the top ports were, surprisingly, all coalesced into one connector. This makes attaching them a lot easier, as with most other cases you have to deal with individual wires/connectors; I assume that the layout Enermax chose for these connectors was indicative of the common pinout used by most motherboard manufacturers nowadays; if your USB/firewire connectors have a different pinout, you're out of luck unless you want to physically re-arrange the wires in the connector. The audio ports (headphone/mic) were, however, arranged into single wire/connectors. The front panel connectors (Power, Reset, LEDs) were pretty much standard fare, but also included was a chassis intrusion-detection connector; this little wire was connected to a momentary switch on the back of the chassis; when the side panel is removed, it breaks the circuit (as the side panel is holding the switch down), and this can be detected by motherboards that have the chassis intrusion detection header. Useful if you want to know when your case has been opened, but for a personal system in your home, it doesn't really have much merit.

Front panel, USB, firewire and audio connectors.

Top ports are wired into a small PCB.

Plastic wire guides keep things neat.

Small pictorial stickers explain almost everything.

Lastly, there were a few small things that made working in this case nice. Firstly, the wires for the top ports and front panel connections were cleanly routed through two plastic clamps/guides in order to make the inside of the case a bit neater. These guides help keep these wires away from the main area over the motherboard; in this way they are very helpful as you won't have them dangling over the CPU or other expansion cards. It was very nice to see the manufacturer include a system for keeping the wires out of the way, instead of leaving the job to you. Secondly, there are small black-and-white pictorial stickers explaining how to do everything inside of the case; these things are everywhere. In case some aspect of installation with this case isn't too intuitive, these helpful stickers explain the process.

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