Blue UV Reactive Acrylic Case

Company: Xoxide
Product: Blue UV Reactive Acrylic Case
Street Price: $129.99 (bare case only)
Date Reviewed: June 26, 2003
Reviewed By: Jason Rabel

The Assembled Case:

As I mentioned before, Xoxide pre-assembled the case and added in some goodies for us to save us some time, this isn't done for the end customer, but assembly should be fairly easy.

With normal inside lighting, the case looks just like any other clear case, however if sunlight hits it you can start to see some blue tint on the edges, hinting that this isn't any ordinary clear case. The case design itself is very simple, all the bays are 5 1/4 width, but they include spacers so that you can mount 3 1/2" hard drives, floppies, and whatnot. The speaker is mounted on the bottom of the case, and there are 4 clear feet that you can't really see.

All parts have been machined with excellent precision, all the edges are straight as well as the grooves for drive bays and fan vents.

The basic design of the case is that you have 1 x 80mm fan in the front, 1 x 80mm fan in the back (not including the PSU), 1 x 80mm fan on top, and 2 x 80mm fans on the side panel. This cooling is pretty standard and should give more than adequate airflow. The front block-off plates are held in place by round metal tabs that have a rubber o-ring in them, once you get the plate in position and the two tabs in place everything stays in position.

Some of the accessories that come with the case are the assembly instructions, white gloves (so you don't get fingerprints all over your case), lots of screws and spacers so you can mount your peripherals, and a backplate (though most MB's have a custom backplate). The reason you can't use regular screws with this case is because of the thickness of the acrylic. Xoxide also included a couple UV CCFLs for us (the CCFLs are also non-standard items that would cost you extra).

One thing I learned about the case is to mount the drives and such first, because the motherboard attaches directly to the right panel! So if you every want to add or remove a drive, you have to pull your motherboard out (ick!). Another thing is since the entire case is clear, cable management is a must! I was kind of rushed for this review so I didn't have time to tidy up all the power cables for all the lights. Nor did I have the proper tools to drill out holes for the light switches so I had them all laying in the bottom of the case.

Once everything was assembled in the case it added quite a bit of weight, but also seemed to add some rigidity. Don't be fooled though, even though the acrylic is quite thick for the structural part of the case, it can still crack. UPS actually managed to do a little damage to the case even though it was very well packed (which is one reason they normally ship the case unassembled). Also take care when mounting everything, you can scratch the acrylic if you aren't careful.