A Detailed Look – At the Inside

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The chassis of the MS1000-HS2 is manufactured from galvanized steel and overlayed with Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) plastic that’s been given a matte black finish. The interior of the case is pretty spacious and leaves plenty of room for large third-party heatsinks and watercooling solutions as well as dual, triple, and quad graphics card configurations.

 

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Zalman included unique quick release clips to secure optical devices. These clips use a simple push button to lock the device into place. We’ll see how these actually work during the installation portion of this review.

 

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The back and top panels come with two 120mm fans and the top panel can house one more 120mm to give users a little more room to expand how the case cools their hardware. There are also two rubber grommets to install an exterior watercooling device for the CPU or graphics cards.

 

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One of my favorite aspects of this case is how each hard drive cage functions. The back panel of each case includes three SATA connectors, one fan connector, molex power connector and a fan controller. These connectors are very user friendly and during connector three SATA power cables into just using one molex connector to power all three of the hard drives in each cage.

 

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The case also supports micro ATX and ATX motherboards, but it disappointed me a bit because it wasn’t removable. Zalman did had some nice cable management holes to the right of the motherboard, but I would have liked a removable tray to make installation a lot easier on the consumer.

 

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I took a quick photo of the optical bays because two of them are normal, but the other two can house solid state drives and other 2.5″ devices. I would have liked to see some type of cooling solution for the bottom bays like the one they added for the lower hot-swappable hard drive cages because a lot more people will be using SSDs this year because of their relatively-low cost and better performance than typical hard drives.

 

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Here’s a quick shot of the back of the motherboard tray. This is where many users will hide SATA and power cables to keep the front of their case from having too much clutter around their expensive components.

 

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Lastly, I wanted to show our readers the sound dampening material Zalman used on one of the side panels. I say one panel because the other does not have this material installed. I found this a bit odd considering they are touting this case to consumers as a silent solution for their high-end hardware. We’ll have to dock Zalman a few points at the end of the review for this misstep.

 

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