Physical examination I
The front of the Evesham-branded Chenbro chassis is pleasant enough. The front ports are situated at the very bottom and are hidden by a drop-down door. A multi-format reader is conspicuous by its absence.
Expansion-wise, there's a couple of spare 5.25in bays right below the twin Sony optical drives.
The left-hand side panel has a built-in duct that channels cooler air over the CPU area. There's no pre-installed fan to help with the cooling efforts, though. The lower meshed section provides a modicum of additional airflow to the graphics card.
Ventilation is further enhanced by Evesham situating a slow-spinning 120mm exhaust fan on the rear. A closer look at the back, though, shows that the chassis isn't tool-less; a couple of screws have to be removed before gaining access to the guts of the system.
We've reviewed the eSATA-supporting Foxconn motherboard before and it remains a good choice for a midrange system, with the proviso that it doesn't support dual x16 PCIe multi-graphics-card operation.
The XFX GeForce 7900GS is a single-slot card, so you're still left with four additional expansion slots, including one PCIe x1 and one x4.
[advert]A look inside shows reasonable cable routing within a tight-ish chassis. The supplied Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 CPU has a 65W TDP and a reference heatsink with more than enough dissipation power to cool it without the fan spinning at full tilt.
The motherboard supports a further five SATA devices and an additional four 3.5in hard drives can be installed in the chassis. The supplied 320GB Western Digital drive was formatted into a single NTFS partition.
The three main fans in the system are grouped together, yet the system was very quiet when under load and the cumulative noise was barely perceptible from three feet away.
