Mid-Tower Mega Roundup

DynaPower F3323 (cont'd)

With the ability to hold extended motherboards and full-size expansion cards, the interior of the F3323 is very spacious - especially for typical desktop components.

DynaPower has made a great effort to keep the system entirely tool-less, and most of the implementations of this goal actually turned out really well. The retention clip for the 5¼” drives, for instance, simply applies pressure to hold the drives until the user depresses the large, color-coded tab to release them. The single external 3½” bay has a similar system, but uses a coiled spring to apply pressure to the mounting pins.

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We were a bit shocked to find that the F3323 only has dedicated space for four hard disk drives. Being a server case this large, we feel that it really would've made more sense to make it slightly larger if that's what it took to allow the case to hold twice as many. As it is currently designed, there is actually quite a large portion of unused space in the front bottom of the chassis.

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Perhaps more annoying than the lack of more hard drive bays, however, are the rails themselves. Once in place, they hold the drive steadfast with no issues. Actually, getting the rails to stay in place on the drive while one loads them into the bay, however, is not all that easy. If they were simple push pins, this would not be much of an issue, but they're actually pieces of metal that run the length of the rail and are then bent at the tips into points meant for insertion into the drive's mounting threads.

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One also has to be careful that their IDE cables will be long enough - the case's extra depth made it just barely possible to use our standard ribbon cables.

Another possibly big gripe for a lot of users will be the omission of any case fans in this enclosure. While having a case ready to use out of the box is certainly important to many people, DynaPower must feel as if it makes more sense to let the user determine what kind of fan to use, if any is used at all.

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Since we wanted to make the case comparisons as close to "out of the box as we could, we were reluctant to add any fan at all - but this would be rather rare in our opinion, so we included a spare Panasonic Panaflo 120mm fan for testing. Known for its air-pushing prowess, we chose to include an in-line fan speed controller to keep the fan from creating overwhelming noise.

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