External Observations
Starting at the front of the Lexa, we decided to go with the door open, as we just could not get a good shot of the closed front due to the glare.
We’ve removed one of the four drive bay covers so you can get an idea of the reflective nature of the front panel, with the black plastic bezel almost rivaling the silver metallic front.
You can also see that there is a form covering over the top two wings (that’s what they remind me of). What’s underneath? Well, the back cover really hides nothing of interest, but the front when removed reveals this!
A very handy illuminated LCD display for monitoring your systems core components. Three thermal probes are provided; one for your CPU, one for your Hard Drive and one for your System. The only down side (for many Americans), is that the readings are only available in Celsius and not Fahrenheit.
Moving on to the top of the case, you can see the only 80 mm fan that is supplied with the case and the only fan that is non-LED. I would have liked to see a 120 mm fan up there serving as an exhaust fan, but it might have interfered with the upper most drive bay.
Without jumping ahead, the photo above shows us one of the Lexa’s unique features which I’ve only seen on one or two of the hundreds of cases I’ve looked at. But, we’ll get to it later.
In our next photo we have a side view shot with the windowed side panel in place and you really get the feel of the symmetrical design.
The windowed side panel has a pre-mounted 120 mm LED quiet fan and is filtered. The latch with the NZXT logo contains a lock for your security. The reason the latch is somewhat duller is because I left the plastic protective coating in place so I could take the photo with limited glare.
Being somewhat of a cooling fanatic, I have often complained that the great majority of computer enclosures sat to close to the surface, be it the floor or desk top, thus losing an area that could bring in to the motherboard cavity, either forced or passive air. It seems the designers of the Lexa agree with me (ah, for once).
Our next photo below is of the back panel, but it is no ordinary rear panel, with a plastic curved attachment that maintains the Lexa’s symmetrical design.
Please note on the left hand side you’ll see two indentations with screws in them, the screws have been removed from the right side. Why is that important? Without removing the screws on the right side, there is no way you are going to get inside the case even if the side panel is unlocked. You can remove this attachment permanently if you wish, but I like it as it adds to the Lexa’s look.
What we have left, is a pretty standard back panel with a 120 mm quiet LED fan pre-mounted, but again we see two additional sets of holes meaning that you could always change out the fan and replace it with a 92 or 80 mm fan. Why would anyone want to do that?
Finally, what would any modern case be today if it lacked the all important front access ports? Did you think we forgot them? No we didn’t, NZXT did a fine job in locating the ports on the lower right side just below the door, as you can see below.
No surprises here, just the standard IEEE 1394 port, two Audio ports and two USB2 ports.
