AspireUSA X-Super Alien Aluminum Case

The front drive bay cover so characteristic of the Chenming design is shaped to look like a weird pair of eyes to some degree.  Subtle touches are rare anymore with so many computer parts makers overdoing small things and forgetting that subtle is the way to go.  The lower front grill on the X-SuperAlien is removable by a single clip at the base.  Upon removing the grilling two LED fans are accessible.  Too bad there is no air filtering here.

     

Opening up the drive bay door exposes FIVE, not four, but FIVE 5.25” drive bays.  It was only recently I began even thinking about having only four drive bays.  My personal machine has a burner, DVD, HDD rack and a Rheobus.  Now you are asking, what else would you need?  To be honest, not much, however in the past few weeks I’ve needed (wanted really) to put a SATA HDD rack in as well and also wanted to do some modding so I could have all my case lighting switches mounted into a drive bay cover.  This seems trivial until you’re the one running out of drive bays and not wanting to buy a tower server case.

  

Mounted in the center of the front bezel is a small panel of sorts.  Two rheostats are on either side of a dual temperature display.  The probe tips are of the thin tip variety that are actually useful and easy to mount.  The probes are also labeled CPU and HDD.  At first, I gave this no thought until I fired up the system.  The temperature display also displays CPU and HDD.  Personally, I would have preferred to see something more generic like “sensor 1” and “sensor 2.”  The only temps I really monitor are my CPU and VGA.  No big deal, I just don’t like seeing a temp labeled one thing when its used to measure something else.  Call me Monk.

     

Moving our gaze to the left side panel, a full sized case window is here to show off your gear and skill (or lack there of) in dealing with cable clutter.  The side panel is opened by a small handle that can be locked to keep inquiring minds and fingers out.  Installed in the panel is an 80mm blowhole.  This is fed by an 80mm blue Quad-LED case fan which sports a pretty hip looking custom fan grill.

     

The rear of the X-SuperAlien shows off the two blue Quad-LED case fans set up as exhaust.  You also get your first glimpse of the case’s included power supply which is anything but the standard included PSU you get with some cases.  More on this later.

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