Gigabyte 3D Mars

Captain_Slick · 3 Jan 2008 at 13:11

Took delivery of this case this morning. Only saw one review on the net for it, so here's some pictures. Enjoy!

The box it came in. It's big. It's industrious. It's from mars. Muscular men, sweat and tears clearly went into this thing.

The usual stuff on the back. Small pictures with captions. Nice and concise, Gigabyte.

The manual. Encased in thickness.

The optional plexi side panel fixture. Come with a mesh one as default. We'll see it in a minute.

The case itself. Nice and packaged to stop those bad delivery men from harming it.

As soon as I got it out, I quickly noticed that there was a slight scratch on one of the side panels. Luckily, it's not the one you'll spend most of your time looking at.

The front of the case. It's a war machine. Or a factory. Or a bird.

Side panel with twin 80mm fans behind a mesh grill. Nice. Should keep those hard drive nice and frosty.

Back of the case. Twin 120mm fans, which I'm guessing light up blue when in operation. Note that this case is entirely aluminium, which means it's light and cool. The heaviest part of the case is the grill structure in the front panel, which I'll show you later.

Captain_Slick · 3 Jan 2008 at 13:12

Here's the side panel I was talking about. It's a nice size for a window or mesh grill, which I imagine will only show off the main components, not the hard drive bays which many case windows think are nice enough to look at...

The innards. As you can see, there is plenty of space to work with, 5 optical drive bays, a couple of external fdd bays and plenty of hard drive bays.

In the box, we have a cloth for keeping the case free of finger prints (within seconds of handling it I had to break this out to keep them from showing! Alas, that's the price we pay for light cool cases). You also get the normal set of screws (thumbscrews, standoffs and a few other assortments). There is also a couple of molex to sata power converters, two sets of keys and a couple of stickified cable holders.

The hard drive bay removed. It can be taken out and rotated for your needs, like so.

You also get the usual assortment of cables from the front panel. Motherboard connecters, USB, Firewire and Audio (HD or AC47, up to you). They've also connected the three 120mm fans (2 at the back, and one at the front) into a single motherboard fan header, which is handy. The two 80mm fans are powered off a molex adapter.

The backside. Looks pretty tidy.

Front panel. Front and back. As you can see, at the bottom of the panel there is a grill, on the backside of which has a wierd mirror coating, and two steel grills. This adds weight to the front of the case, and I'm guessing it's the heaviest part.

And here's the front of the case. Nothing out the ordinary here, really.

Sorry if some of the pictures are a little dark. Still getting used to my camera.

Well, that's it folks. Thanks for looking. This case is going to be the basis of my new computer at the end of the month (when I get paid again!

) so expect to see some pictures of it all setup and running in the cases thread soon.

Bai! ^_^

Blackout · 3 Jan 2008 at 21:58

Nice write up mate. Keep us posted with how your build in this case goes.

Meridian · 3 Jan 2008 at 22:06

It appears to be the same body as a 3D Aurora 570, but with a different outer casing?

M

Captain_Slick · 3 Jan 2008 at 22:10

From what I can make of it, that appears to be the case (Sorry!

). Only thing that's different is the twin 80mm fans and the hard drive rack. Which are good things indeed.

Will do, Blackout. Just finished getting my current PC ready to pass on to my family for their use. Replaced the fans in my Beantech Igloo 3, and replaced the stock HSF with an Freezer 64 Pro. Should go swimmingly now.

Nick1881 · 3 Jan 2008 at 23:00

Looks like a very nice case, I could do with something bigger myself.

Meridian · 4 Jan 2008 at 06:11

mr_x_plosion said:
Looks like a very nice case, I could do with something bigger myself.

That was irony I hope? Those cases are huge.

M

prosser13 · 4 Jan 2008 at 18:29

First I've seen of this case and it looks really nice.

However, the 2 x 80mm fans on the side put me off. A single 120mm would make more sense (quieter for the same airflow) and you could also fix a 120.1 to it