Legit Reviews

 

The first thing you notice with the case door off is the amount of screwless drive bays. Only two of the four 5.25" bays have the clips but you have to keep in mind the top bay is not usable as an external drive bay. The lower 3.5" bays are all screwless expandable on both sides of the case, but include four clips for HDDs and two smaller clips for external 3.5" devices. Screwless expandability is great because some cases are only screwless on one side of the drive bay so this really gives you more options. 

The maximum length of a video card can be 12.4", which includes even the monster Radeon HD 5970! The maximum supported height of a CPU cooler is 163mm which allows for coolers such as the Cooler Master V8 (but not the V6 GT), and all of the Noctua, Thermalright, Corsair, Titan and Scythe offerings among many more! This case really gives you options to use any piece of hardware you want, short of the EVGA SR2, of course.

 

Behind the 3.5" drive bays is about an inch and a half of space for wire storage and routing which is a much easier and quicker alternative to wire routing through grommets.

 

The actual locking mechanisms for the drive bays are very easy to use; simply flick the lever from lock to open to release the drive and back again to secure it.

 

The Elite 430 supports power supplies of any length and has a dust filter over the venting for the PSU fan. Notice the rivets on the lower left corner; the four bottom corners are all of the same construction with the top corners featuring one recessed rivet each. The overall build of the chassis is very strong and takes a lot of force to torque the case at all even with all of the panels off.

 

The motherboard tray features an index with each screw hole marked by a letter for simple installation.

 

The front fan used is the A12025-12CB-3BN-F1 rated for a speed of 1200 RPM, pushing 44.03 CFM of airflow at 19.8 dBA loud. This fan is high flow yet still very quiet.

 

From this angle you can see the great big CPU cutout as well as the avenue to route cables between the tray and drive bays. On this side you cannot use screwless clips for the 5.25" drive bays, but optical drives vibrate so badly I always use screws as no clip can prevent vibration like tightened screws do.