Akasa Enigma

Inside the Enigma

Accessing the Enigma’s innards is nice and simple, requiring the removal of just a pair of screws at the rear and then sliding off the combined top and side casing to reveal the compact interior.

Akasa has been extremely ambitious with the Enigma’s tiny dimensions and there’s a whole lot to squeeze inside. To help accomplish this, there's a three tiered system with the motherboard mounted directly onto the case’s panelling via pre-fitted motherboard risers and then the 2.5” HDD and slim optical drive mounted above them.

And it doesn’t really work too well we’re sad to report, with plenty of little niggles and annoyances helping to make the Enigma one of the most horrid cases we’ve ever fitted even a basic system into. Removing the drive mounting trays is easy enough, and so is angling in your Mini-ITX motherboard (we’re using a Gigabyte GA-GC23OD with a single core 1.6GHz Atom CPU), but problems soon arise when it comes to fitting the drives and their respective mounting systems.

The use of a 20/24 pin ATX power connector is great for easy compatibility, but the cable rises from the power delivery circuitry vertically, not horizontally, meaning you’ll have to bend the many cables to 90° to fit under the optical drive mounting.


The 2.5” drive mount is also a problem, requiring a 90° SATA connector (not supplied) to even fit in the case, which even then fouls the power circuitry below making for an unsecure connection – an alarmingly obvious design oversight that we’re surprised has made it into the final product.

The decision to include support for an optical drive also means there’s barely more than a three millimetres of clearance between the motherboard PCB and the drive mounting above, making even coolers sold as ultra low profile like the Zalman CNPS 8000, useless. In our looking the only 775 cooler which will fit inside this case is the SilverStone NT07, but at 36.5mm it’ll still be a damned tight squeeze - you'd barely get a playing card between fan and optical drive.


This is compounded by the fact that while the area at the top of the board, in which our Atom CPU sits, is clear of obstructions and close to the ventilation cut into the side panelling, the actively cooled Northbridge sits right underneath the optical drive mounting and has its airflow totally obscured by the optical drive installed above.

This demonstrates a potentially disastrous flaw, as without the minor airflow from the 40mm fan onto the 945GC Northbridge and across our passively cooled Atom CPU, or any other CPU fitted into the case for that matter, they have no way of keeping cool. While this problem will be lessened for larger, actively cooled CPUs like Intel’s Core 2 Duo, actually finding something to fit and cool effectively is another question entirely. While there are ultra low profile coolers out there, measuring below the 37mm height limitation, we're confident of their cooling potential.

This isn’t helped by the large amount of cabling you’ll have to smoosh down beneath the mounting frames to complete the build and while all the front panel cabling is double ended and thus removable (a great touch common to all Akasa cases), you’ll still find yourself tripping over power, SATA and Molex connectors to finish your build. Thankfully though when fitting a slimline laptop optical drive you won't have to worry about an adapter as Akasa has included a Slimline to IDE adapter, although this means yet more cabling to fit inside an already very cramped interior.