Product gallery - Exterior
The rear of the chassis is like a work of art on its own. We see that everything is black again, including retention holder for your PCI(e) cards up-to black thumbscrews to secure them. On top we see two nice big grommet holes for water-cooling tubing, the I/O slot and a 120mm fan.
Very hard to see on the photo, but to the middle right you can spot a vertical slot. This can be used for expansion brackets that plug into the headers on your motherboard, this could be beneficial to people that need large amounts of USB or Firewire brackets. As simple as that is I find it a brilliant idea. It's often the simple ideas that make a product shine and stand out from the rest.
The top of the chassis is a real treat alright. Here we can find the front-panel I/O - which is a significant change over the original chassis. We see a fan LED on/off switch, e-SATA header, audio jacks, USB 2.0, a reset switch, and a power switch.
Behind the panel is a protective cover for a feature that is another exclusive to the Advanced model we test today. Behind the latch/ cover showwn on the left is in fact a utility panel that functions as a SATA HDD/SSD dock. Literally if you have your HDDs setup in AHCI mode you could pop in and out a HDD here on the fly within Windows. If not (like 99%) of you guys, you simply slide in the HDD, startup your system and you are good to go. Extremely handy, and again something extremely simple that makes the product shine.
Behind it HDD dock we can see a large mesh, underneath it you can house two 120mm fans or a dual radiator. We'll show you that in a minute from the inside out though.
When we look at the bottom we see rubber feet to prevent resonating and vibration, a huge mesh for PSU ventilation and to the right two spots for 120mm fans, conveniently covered with a removable dust filter. The PSU mesh also has a separate dust filter you can optionally install, let me show you these accessories.
Here we see the accessories included in the box, you'll receive screws, motherboard stand-offs, 3.5" bracket, cable ties, 5.25" to 3.5" mesh dust filter panel for the PSU, plastic rivets, a buzzer, and a surprising to see, a VGA retention bracket.
The VGA retention bracket is located to the upper right, and is intended for for SLI and Crossfire users to reduce the amount of pull of two or three graphics cards.
The bracket, when installed, sits next to your graphics cards and is secured in place by two screws through the back of the case that can be adjusted to fit different card set-ups or motherboards. The VGA bracket also has the option to house a 80mm case fan for additional VGA cooling. This feature again is for the CM 690 II Advanced edition only.
