Kingwin SK-523 Case

No clips and latches to keep the door secure here, it's all magnets.  The magnet that holds the door in place is probably a bit stronger than it needs to be but in my opinion that adds to a sturdy feel.  The door itself feels well balanced and opens smoothly.  If you look closely at the rear of the bezel you will see a standard 12" Cold Cathode Florescent Light.  What's interesting about this is that because it's a standard CCFL, you can swap in any color CCFL you like with the removal of four Phillips head screws.

  

Behind the door we see five 5.25" and two 3.5" drive bays.  The visible drive bays have two small slits on either side of the silver colored plastic covers.  Each slit is in front of a plastic retention tab for the bay cover.  So if you don't want to pop out the cover out with the highly technical finger jab technique from the inside, a small flat bladed screwdriver will do just as good from the out. 

The power and reset buttons are centrally located on the bottom half of the bezel's face just below the power and activity lamps.  All that venting you see is there for a reason.  Don't forget the primary intake fan is a 120mm.

The access ports are side mounted on the Kingwin SK-523.  A small door conceals your standard mic, speaker and two USB jacks in addition to a very non-standard SATA port.  I don't see a big need or desire for this but Kingwin feels that the need is there from my conversations with them.  For me, it's like Firewire; I don't have a need for it now but I have it if I find I need it later.  Speaking of Firewire, there is no external Firewire access port.  The knob just above the access port panel is a rheostat that controls a secondary fan.  Tracing the rheo back to the base of panel wires inside the case, we find two three pin fan connections; one for power, one for output.  This is for whatever fan you want the rheo to control.  Very clean thinking here.  Above this is your traditional bezel door lock to keep four year olds and the like out.

  

Turning things 90 degrees we get a view of the windowed left side panel.  The SK-523 is offered in a windowed and window-less version as a quick aside.  The window is a tad smaller than windows we've seen elsewhere.  The virtue of the smaller window though is that you don't have the right four inch edge obscured with the interior drive rack as it is on larger windows.

Around back we see seven expansion slots and a 120mm exhaust fan.  Most water cooling kits have shifted to 120mm fans.  With the case making this shift as well, you won't run into a compatibility problem if you have a fat H2O kit in your future.  And speaking of compatibility, notice that the exhaust fan vent area supports 80, 90 or 120mm fans.  Very nice.  The opposite side panel is also shown below but nothing special of note there.

  

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