Overclocker Cafe - AOpen A600

AOpen A600 Aluminum Case

Our first look at this case told us that this was indeed something very nice on the eyes. The entire case is black, except for on the front where we have a raised section surrounding the drive bays, which is almost a gun-metal gray in color. Very pleasing to the eye are the smooth edges and clean lines that accentuate the front bezel.

Elegant in appearance, the power and reset buttons are recessed slightly into the front bezel. While this does, in my opinion, enhance the look; the reset button is somewhat difficult to access. I found that it was almost necessary for me to use a pen to get to it.

On the bottom is a sort of louvered design that I at first took to be purely decorative. At least until I noticed the word "Open" stenciled there (Duh!)

Blending in very nicely is a door that opens to reveal the front access ports for your audio, USB and FireWire. Plus the construction of the louvers does allow for airflow into the front of the case.

Moving to the sides of the case we see that they are pretty typical. One of the side panels of our case has the optional window in it. Now, the windowed side panel for this case isn't all that large, but as Dean has said to me before.....not everyone likes a large window.

The window is sufficiently large enough to easily see the motherboard, expansion cards and any kind of neat little light producing thingies that you want to put in it. However it is small enough to hide from view your PSU, HDDs and if you're picky about it, any kind of cable clutter you want to go unnoticed. Something that is really outstanding about this case is the finish on the paint job. Not only smooth and clean to the touch, but extremely shiny as well. It was rather difficult getting a good picture without any type of reflection on the surface of the case, and as you can see.....even after all the effort I tried to put into it, I still got a nice reflection of the light behind me.

One thing that you might notice when looking at either side of this case is the cut out frits on the sides of the front bezel. While the cutouts on the bottom half of the case are solid, and designed more for continuity of the cases looks, the top ones are completely cut through to allow additional airflow around your 5.25" drive bays.

Before moving on, let's take a look at the feet of this case. Just as with several other cases we have reviewed here, the A600 has feet which swivel out from under the base for added stability.

But with the A600, you get a much larger foot print (pun intended) for stability. The feet for this case are easily twice as wide as those found on both the X-Pider and RaidMax Scorpio cases. No need to worry about some troublesome pest knocking this one over.

Moving to the back of the case we see that while the layout is similar, there are some marked differences. It is however nice to see that AOpen uses some nice thumbscrews for the side panels of the case.

Notice the power supply up top. This initially caught my eye because of the mesh screen instead of the normal fan grill that I am used to seeing. The reason for this became apparent on closer inspection as I realized that there is no rear exhaust fan for the PSU. It has a single 120mm intake fan mounted on the bottom pulling air up into it and out the rear. I was a bit concerned about this at first until I powered it up. The oversized fan that the PSU uses is not only effective in pulling air from inside the case, but it's also fairly quiet as well.

BACK NEXT