Anidees AI-6 Review
The Buiild
Published: 21st January 2013 | Source: Anidees | Price: £99.99 |
The Build
The inclusion of a bolt key makes the insertion and tightening of the motherboard stand offs a simple task, with the motherboard dropping cleanly into place without the need to wiggle it round obstructions. The cable management holes are well spaced and of good size. The rubber grommets however are easily displaced when feeding cables though and are an absolute pig to get back into place. On the image below right you can also see a fan power distribution unit. Feed this with a supply from a Molex and you can power up to 5 3pin fans from it. A secondary unit located higher up in the case receives piggybacked power from this unit and will enable another 3 fans to be added to the circuit.
We've already touched briefly on the space available in the roof of the case, but thought it would be appreciated if we demonstrated with a Motherboard in. As the hex meshed area is actually slightly raised from the rest of the roof of the case there's a total of 33mm of room before you hit the edge of the Motherboard. There is space above for fans, but not full thickness 25mm units.
Loading your HDDs or SSDs into the trays is simple enough, with just 4 rubber isolated screws being sued for the 3.5" drives. Smaller 2.5" drives use different smaller non isolated screws. As you might imagine the drawers simply slide into the racks.
Although the AI-6 is a slim case there's still enough room to fit a cooler up to 160mm in height. Below we've shown it with the Havik 120, a particular favourite of ours, who's black cowling and white blades just happen to match the colour scheme of the AI-6 to a tee. At exactly 160mm in height the Havik Fits with no interference with the side panel.
Turning the AI-6 around to look at the reverse and undertake our cable management we find that we are provided with good lengths of cable from the front I/O, meaning that not only can we reach the desired area on our Motherboard but we can do so without having to stretch the cables diagonally across the rear. Two parallel rows of cable tie points run vertically down the centre of the case and serve a good route for both the PSU and the front I/O cables. Although a half decent job can be achieved we have to say that with only 15mm of space it was a bit tight getting the door on. An additional 5mm of space would have made all the difference.
The large CPU cut out makes it easy to swap out your cooler, a particularly useful feature if like us you change a cooler more often than you change your underwear, and even if you don't, having a decent sized cut out sure as hell makes mounting a cooler a much less onerous task. The image below right is aimed to show how tight it is behind the mobo. Here we've tried to stash an un needed bundle of cables down the side, but have been unable to fully hide them due to the limited room.
Cable management issues aside, the only other real issue with the AI-6 we had were a few rivets that needed de burring. Unfortunately some of these were rather pronounced and in places that could potentially cause a few cut knuckles if you weren't careful. The images below are of the 3.5" bays, PCI slots and the PSU area and show clearly what we're talking about. The one in the PSU area in the black case actually had to be trimmed to allow the PSU to fit and to prevent it causing damage to the PSU.
Fully built we've decided to show the case with its window fitted, (remember the 6 variations of this case that are available). We have to say we think this window is spot on as it's just the right size and in exactly the right position to show off your motherboard, GPU and RAM etc, without exposing the ugliness of a drive rack or the cabling disappearing through the management holes. Who wants to see any of that stuff?
Most Recent Comments
Great review as always Always nice to see new contenders in the case-market. However i think this one has to improve a lot to get sales on other features than it beeing different and a new brand...
No support for rads in the front and/or roof is in my opinion a total miss in 2013.
It had some nice features tho so im thinking nice first :-)
btw - a few of the photos dont have links + array=cluster? idk im norwegian ffs :-)
Really elegant look.You could do full on video review about it Tom, even that it got only silver award, will be nice to see that.
Though I do think that you could also get a better case for that pricepoint :L
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Originally Posted by Lystfiskern
@wassupdoc: To bad u missed the intro - u would know what gave the name...but its nice to see u enjoyed the review as a whole.
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Even P.M'd TTL wrt a potentially embarrassing mistake 
Who doesn't enjoy Gary's reviews 
http://www.abload.de/thumb/2012-10-0114.32.12ambld.jpg http://www.abload.de/thumb/2012-10-0114.33.064gxgo.jpg http://www.abload.de/thumb/2012-10-0114.33.27v6zzs.jpg http://www.abload.de/thumb/2012-10-0114.34.55twb2i.jpg http://www.abload.de/thumb/2012-10-0114.35.343kl6m.jpg http://www.abload.de/thumb/img_20130113_171324x8li9.jpg
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Originally Posted by andrevautour
I think it looks good.
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CSS Valid
http://www.overclock3d.net/gfx/artic...131622863l.jpg
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