| #771 - XG Viper 2 Case |
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| Written by Zach Jeffers | |
| Sunday, 14 January 2007 | |
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Page 6 of 9
Inside the Viper: When you pull off the side panels of the XG Viper 2 case, you will find a bunch of wires, leads, etc. Inside you will also find the accessories box. This is supposed to be tied to the motherboard tray with a simple twist tie, but for some reason it wasn't!   Among the mess of wires you will find, in the first picture, the front I/O leads. The second picture is your hard drive activity indicator lead, power and reset switch leads. Third, your speaker lead and fourth, fan and power headers as well as thermal probe. A nice touch here is that XG has sleeved the thermal probe with a plastic tube so that it will not be damaged during shipping!     While sorting out the different wires, to my surprise, I found an Intrusion Switch Alarm. This is not an alarm in of itself, but connects to any supporting motherboard to alert you upon boot if your system has been tampered with. Out of all the years of motherboards that I have had, I have seen this option many times, but never have actually had a case that utilized this feature. Very cool for a budget case!  Inside the Viper 2, at the front, you will find the four 5.25� bays and the six 3.5� bays. None of these are removable and you will have to slide your components in from either the front or inside. Next to the 3.5� internal bays, you will see that there is a hole to allow the switch leads to go through and the edges are curled over. This is a very welcome site among budget cases.   Next to this hole, in front of the drive bays, you will find an included 80mm quad red LED intake fan mounted with normal fan screws. At the back of the case, you will find an included 120mm quad red LED exhaust fan. This is mounted onto a 120mm to 80mm adapter.   Above the exhaust fan, you will find where the power supply mounts. There are two tabs to help support the PSU, but with a PSU that incorporates a large intake fan, these can pose a problem. One thing that is nice, is an included black foam anti vibration pad. Down to the expansion bays, you will find a single black retention lever to secure your cards without the need for tools. In case you break one of the retention levers, there is the standard screw down so that you can revert back to using a normal screw.   At the back side of the motherboard tray, you can see the mounting holes as well as the PSU support tab hole. The motherboard tray in this chassis is not removable as the tray acts as a stabilizer and is riveted to the bottom of the case.    Taking a look at the side panels, you can see that the under side of the panels was not painted the bright gloss red. This is normal for a budget case and no big deal as you can not see it. You can see a pair of scissors demonstrating the transparency of the smoked Plexiglas. At the front of the panels you can see how the 'cheeks' are mounted to the side panels.   You can see here that the windows are held into place by metal tabs. I really like this option as screws or rivets can be over tightened causing cracking or spider webbing. Something that I saw as a possible oversight was that these tabs can be seen from the outside on the smaller Viper window.    On the back side of the windowed panel's vents, you can see that there is no mounting option to take advantage of this ventilation. This left a slight bad taste in our mouth. One thing we did notice while looking at this, was some scratching on the window and corresponding panel. This can obviously be attributed to the loose accessories box. This is not the fault of the shipper (Geeks.com) but rather XG's assembly line. This is more than likely an isolated incident and should not affect any other units.    |