Sunbeam Samurai Case

Opening the front bezel is where things started to go wrong.  The bezel door is thin gauge plastic which is no big deal, but coupling with the door being hung on plastic hinges that are hot glued in place was trouble.  This allows for a significant amount of flex in the door pull.  The case is lightweight thin gauge steel which also flexes.  Originally, the door just seemed to stick until I put together the problem.  The third time I successfully opened the door (knowing of the problem and being careful the plastic door catch broke off.

     

On the good side, the front bezel door conceals five 5.25" bays and one 3.5" bay.  Not much else other than that.

The side panel's window design is rather pleasing.  A snappy look without being too gaudy.  Just off center is an 80mm blue LED case fan.  As we noted in our review of the Sunbeam Transformer, the fans used here are top shelf; LED jobs that have power connections for both three-pin and four pin Molex.  This is very nice plus for the people running three-pin accepting fan controllers out there.

  

Out back we find another discrepancy with the Sunbeam case specs.  They cite the Samurai as having a 120mm rear exhaust fan.  Looks like two 80mm exhaust vents to me...  The bevel cut you see is a result of the way Sunbeam did their tool free card stays which we'll get to shortly. 

  

The right side panel has a small strip of vents just below its horizontal centerline.  On the front most edge we find two smartly placed USB 2.0 ports above a mic and speaker jack.

  

Pop the hood

The side panel was easily removed and exposed the small interior of the Samurai.  This case is designed to be small so the cramped conditions inside were expected.  No removable mainboard tray but this is a $56 case so we can't complain about that.  While the mainboard area looks too tight, we did install an ASUS P4C800E Deluxe with the side IDE connectors and had an inch clearance to go on the side.

BACK                    NEXT