SLEEK AND SUBTLE SOPHISTICATION

ALRIGHT, you can probably tell by this point that we’re in love with this build. In fact, what you can achieve with this chassis is nothing short of epic. From a building standpoint, although it does lack the cable-management finesse we’re perhaps more used to in the modern era, that rotated motherboard design and thermal channel, mixed with the absolutely insane amount of fans that we managed to install into it, made it a joy to work in. Combine that with the insane level of internal space to play with, and the surprisingly small footprint it takes up on a desk, and it’s a remarkable piece of tech.

We did have issues, of course. That front panel and those pins were certainly among them, and the cable management quandaries with the lack of lockdown points, and the length of some of the items was mildly problematic (particularly for the 12VHPWR), but that’s nothing some—you guessed it—custom cables couldn’t fix.

Similarly, the topmost fan in a chassis like this looks very much out of place. In a more traditional orientation in any other case, it’d make a lot more sense in that position, but as a single exhaust in the roof, it just looks bizarre, despite being very useful for encouraging airflow. It performs fine, it just looks odd.

On initial boot, we did actually have a few issues with those rear exhaust fans (on the AIO) not powering on at all. Hilariously, this was due to them not being plugged in. For whatever reason, we forgot to actually plug the fans into the passthrough hub attached to the AIO, and just plugged the top fan into the hub, and the hub into the link. It’s those little details that catch you off-guard using daisy-chaining solutions. Going from perpetually building PCs with masses of cables in a direct manner to a serial solution is just baffling at times. Still, a quick cable re-route, and one extra chucked in, and it was running like clockwork.

The power cable connected to the GPU is a little bit of a tight fit here. A custom cable would do it wonders, and help give us a little extra length to work with in the process. 1 Annoyingly, although the NZXT Z790 motherboard technically supports PCIe 5.0 SSDs, it doesn’t on its M.2 slots, so we’ll definitely be changing out the board as soon as possible. 2 This top-mounted fan looks a little lonely in comparison to the rest of the build. Mounting it externally will make a big difference to the overall look without compromising cooling. 3 Corsair’s iCUE Link AIO CPU block has an option in iCUE to rotate the display. Some LCDs don’t, so always double-check before you make your AIO purchase if you’re using a rotated case like this. 4