In Win Dragon Slayer Review (Page 3 of 4)

Page 3 - Physical Look - Inside

Sliding open the side panels, you will be greeted with the internals of the In Win Dragon Slayer. This is a very standard layout for most modern cases these days, as we can see the motherboard tray and power supply area on the left side, with the drive bays at the right top and bottom corners. There are more than enough cable management slots all around. Since this is a mATX chassis, you shouldn't be too surprised when it measures to 430mm in height, 196 mm in width, and 426 mm in depth. The Dragon Slayer actually provides you with more room to work with than most mATX chassis on the market these days.

As mentioned on the preceding page, we can see a dark yellow 92 mm rear mounted exhaust fan in conjunction to a 140 mm top cooling fan perpendicular to each other. Both of them has 3-pin headers, and are not sleeved. From my own personal perspective, I am not such a big fan of top mounted fans with the open mesh design, since it lets in a lot of dust. However, In Win does implement a dust filter here, which I much appreciate since it does keep a good amount of dust out of my system, and thus, I would not have to clean it out as often as I would. There is also a clean-cut rectangle next to the rear exhaust fan for your motherboard inputs and outputs, as we can see from the above photo. In Win also provides you with an octagonal-shaped opening on the motherboard tray for easy access to the back of your motherboard for aftermarket heatsink backplate installation.

Here is a clearer shot of the inside of the back panel area. There are five expansion slots available. Each expansion card can be secured by a dark yellow preinstalled tool-free clip. One complaint I have here is that these clips do not give enough pressure in regards to holding your cards in place, and when extra force is applied from the back side, your cards tend to become somewhat loose. However, there are screw holes there for you to hold your cards in place. In my opinion, the dark yellow clips are a bit too large, or at least, for my liking. You will need a very thin screwdriver in order to screw your cards in place.

At the bottom, there are four rubber risers to support your power supply. This will give some room between the bottom of the case and your power supply, and it also acts as vibration dampeners. A dust filter is implemented here to prevent dust from entering your power supply if you ever decide to place your chassis over an areas where this may be a problem, such as carpet. The back side is completed with the standard opening for typical power supplies.

At the front of the In Win Dragon Slayer, you will be greeted with a circuit board and a 140 mm fan sandwiched between the drive bay areas. The circuit board provides two standard USB 2.0 ports, one USB 3.0 port, and two 3.5mm audio jacks. For the most part, the I/O cables are bundled up neatly, so you can easily differentiate which cables are which. However, I would much preferred that the connectors for the power button, hard drive LED, and the such are bundled and sleeved in a more fashionable manner instead of having it look like it came straight from an electronics lab.

As for the drive bays, these can be easily locked into place via the tool-free twist-and-pull lock. The top section has one 5.25" bay and one 3.5" bay, respectively. The bottom section implements an Inception-like design, as it features a hard drive bay within a hard drive bay. (Okay, I wrote that just so it sounds cool; it's actually just a shell.) I will go into further detail of how the installation process worked out on the next page.

Here is a quick look at the back side of the Dragon Slayer. We can see In Win has provided more than sufficient amount of cable management slots for such a small case. In Win expects the consumer to utilize the back side efficiently, as there is not too much space on the other side to route all your cables. I would have much preferred it if In Win provided more space here between the motherboard tray and the right side panel, because there will be lots of cables running through the back side in such a small dimension of space. This is especially true when you have a thick 24-pin motherboard cable going through here.


Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. Physical Look - Outside
3. Physical Look - Inside
4. Installation and Conclusion