Sunbeam Trio Case

The front bezel's lower left corner attracts your attention immediately with its cluster of three analog gauges.  A reflective silver ring encircles the blue background of each gauge making it stand out all the more against the black steel chassis.  Like the Cooler Master Musketeer, Sunbeam demonstrates the appeal of breaking away from a normally boring digital readout.  We'll cover the different gauges and their functions in a bit.

Three-quarters of the front bezel is covered with a colored metal screen.  This gives the Trio the look of a stereo speaker to some degree.  By opening the bezel door we find that the screen over the drive bay area is all that is between the drives and you.  This is nice in that you can see a muted glow of any optical drive activity indicators while in operation.  Centered on the right edge are your power and reset buttons as well as the power and HDD activity lamps.  One last thing before we move on.  It is hard to make out in the photo but the bezel door is held closed by two small magnets.  This allows for a reasonably secure closure and almost effortless opening and closing of the door.

Along the right edge on the right side we find our access ports.  Two USB 2.0 ports, Firewire, speaker and mic jack are centrally located here.  These are flanked by a fan speed control that can be connected to any four pin Molex fan you like.  Unfortunately, it won't allow for RPM monitoring but you do get feedback via the front panel gauge displaying 0-100% power being fed to whatever you have connected here.  The top control you see is for Sound Pressure (labeled Volume Level) to give the end user a fun way to measure the amount of sound coming from your case's fans, drives, etc.  Not real useful but usefulness has nothing to do with making something fun.

Let's look more closely at those analog gauges.  Aside from the white labeling on the blue background, each gauge is lit by a blue LED which makes its display stand out under power.  The Volume control is labeled in dBA on its lower markings however the numbering here doesn't seem to correspond to sound levels you would normally encounter.  Fan Speed is marked from 0 to 100% power as previously mentioned while the Temperature gauge is given in actual units (Celsius and Fahrenheit) as detected by a thin tipped thermal probe.

        

Pivoting to the Trio's side.  The left side panel is windowed with an 80mm case fan mounted in such a way as to give a direct outside air feed to your CPU cooler.  Smart and practical.

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