Enlight Extreme Gamers PC Case

Extreme Side Panel, worth the extra?

The case comes fitted with a set of bright red thumbscrews, and if you look close enough you will notice a steel loop to fit a padlock to keep the innards safe from curious fingers, probably designed for when you are sleeping on your keyboard after an all night frag session at a LAN Party. Enlight also included for the review the optionally available Extreme Side Panel, designed to offer improved looks and better cooling.



The panel that comes with the case is the one on the left, it has a red illuminated 92mm fan fitted with a duct designed to sit directly over your CPU to help vent hot air and a smaller one to feed cool air to the GPU fan. If you are fitting a tall CPU cooler though, I expect the duct will be very much in the way, so choose your heatsink/fan combination carefully.

The "Extreme" sidepanel is little more than a windowed panel with a 120mm clear fan fitted on the inside. We at bit-tech often frown upon premodded panels, simply because a well designed and realised window mod can turn a dull case into an exciting one. The risk of having a pre-modded one is turning up at a LAN Party with a clone of every other "Gamers Case" there. Maybe we are being snobbish, but essentially the design of the Extreme side panel is not exactly revolutionary.



As you can see the Duct sits quite high on the standard sidepanel - 80mm to be precise - and with the depth of the case body being 180mm you have 100mm for motherboard risers, motherboard, CPU, Heatsink and Fan. It seems that if you want to fit anything out of the ordinary the only options are to either Dremel the vent off (yep, it is very much fixed) or buy an Extreme sidepanel. Personally I prefer the look of the standard one, but the fact that I'd have to be picky about what cooling solution I use would perhaps sway me to look at another case.

We Built it, did it perform Extremely? Let's see...