SUMMARY: The most popular range of aluminium cases would have to be the ones made by Lian-Li. These cases were light, innovative, attractive and appealed to frequent LANers. Skyhawks, a Taiwanese company which has long been regarded for producing cost effective casing designs with bits of translucent plastic, steps into the aluminium case foray. SkyHawk were kind enough to send us their ATX-4378C-IV aluminum PC chassis for review. Continue reading to find out our verdict about this case.
Connected to a long shaft that goes through the middle of the case are 4 card holders. These are designed to keep a firm grip on your add-in cards and make sure they are well-seated in their slots. It is unlikely that you will knock your case around so much that your addin cards come out of place, but it is a useful safety precaution. If you are a person that adds/removes their cards on a regular basis, the card holders tend to get quite annoying and you will probably end up removing them after the first few weeks. Alternatively, if you are a frequent LAN goer you may appreciate the added security that these card holders offer.
The case features two default cooling fans. The first is a 80mm fan that takes cool air from the outside of the case and blows it down in the direction of the CPU. The second fan is connected to the shaft that holds the card holders. It is arguable whether this fan is useful or not but in our opinion, all it is doing is blowing around the hot air inside the case. The Lian-Li PC-60 features three 80mm case default case fans. One at the back and two at the front. This is another area Skyhawk could have improved on but it is at least nice to see that they made the effort to include two fans. Also, if you take a Dremel to be your lawfully wedded wife we're sure you'll have no troubles remedying the problem.
One feature that Lian-Li cases don't have are front ports. We first saw the idea of redirecting PC ports to the front of the case put in action by a company called FrontX. This was an innovative product but it took up a whole 5 1/4" drive bay which alot of people didn't have to spare. Skyhawk have intelligently included front ports in the 4378C, but have put them at the bottom of the front panel rather than in a drivebay. There are a whole range of front ports that include, 2 USB, PS/2, microphone in, line in, speaker out, volume dial and even a game port for joysticks, gamepads etc. Similar to FrontX, there are cables that go from the front ports and plug into the original ports at the back. If you have alot of case fans this could restrict airflow but we didn't have that problem.
Just above the front panel on the inside of the case are two stereo speakers. Sound comes out of these speakers if there isn't anything connected to the "speaker-out" plug. The volume can be adjusted using the front panel's volume dial. I would prefer to use my external speakers as these tiny magnetically shielded tweeters produce laughable sound. They obviously lack any real bass and being so close together they have no stereo seperation. In my opinion, SkyHawk would have been much better off including 2 exhaust fans instead of speakers, to help extract hot air from the case.
