Chassis tour - part two
Inside, the Zaria A20 SIM is something of a mixed bag. Users who like to work unrestricted may be deterred by the chassis' lack of a removable motherboard tray.
If you're open to working within, however, there are a number of tool-free features to help ease the build process. The chassis' hard drive cage is removable, and all five slots feature plastic drive rails equipped with rubber pads to ease vibration. Simply attach to the rails to a hard drive, and slot it in. Another of the cage's useful features is its ability to be orientated in both directions - allowing users to have hard drive cabling at the left or right of the chassis.
As with the hard drive bays, each of the Zaria A20 SIM's optical bays are tool-free and utilise a one-click push-to-lock mechanism. Ikonik's chosen method is as easy as it gets, slot a drive in place, align the holes and press a button to lock.
Continuing the tool-free approach, all seven expansion slots are held in place by a single tool-less retention bar. Despite its obvious usefulness, however, we found it required extreme amounts of force to get the retention mechanism to operate and consequently found ourselves reverting to screws.
In addition to the tool-free design, the chassis' front-mounted 140mm fan is equipped with a removable dust filter - and another dust filter can be found at the bottom of the chassis to be used with an optional 120mm fan. A nice touch, we felt.
It isn't all good news, however, as we encountered our fair share of difficulties, too. We found the motherboard standoff holes to be poorly tapped, and ended up cross-threading the holes. Adding insult to injury, we found only nine screws supplied for motherboard mounting - one short of the 10 required for our EVGA board.
Once the motherboard is in, it's mostly plain sailing and there's room for ten-and-a-half-inch graphics cards. Getting to that stage isn't easy, though. We found motherboard installation to be awkward due to the tight confines of the chassis, and the matter is made infinitely worse by poorly-routed cabling for the rear exhaust.
Novices, too, might be at a loss as Ikonik's bundled "quick installation guide" is about as brief as they come. The chassis does have a noticeable lack of cable-management tools, and with SIM's added cabling, it can take some time to get it reasonably tidy inside.
