Akasa Enigma

Testing, Value and Final Thoughts

Usually we’d include some results here following our battery of thermal tests but unfortunately the Enigma never even made it out of the starting blocks. With a laptop optical drive installed the Northbridge on our 1.6Ghz single core Atom based board was completely obscured, removing all airflow to the board and crucially to the passively cooled CPU.

While it was able to struggle along at 65-75°C at idle, loading the CPU with Prime95 saw the temperature climb alarming and we eventually pulled the plug with the CPU sat at 123°C after just a couple of minutes, 2°C below the level at which Intel lists the Atom to begin suffering irreparable thermal damage. The Enigma completely failed to keep our single core Atom board anywhere near safe operating temperatures when under load and if we’d left it to run would simply have cooked the hardware installed into it.

Before starting on this review, we'd been running a battery of tests on the same Gigabyte motherboard while it was installed in the Enigma for our impending look at Nvidia's Ion platform (coming this week). For this, we chose not to install an optical drive as we were using a USB DVD writer instead. Without an optical drive and with the lid closed, the system didn't overheat or crash during our testing which included photo editing, video playback and some light gaming - these aren't as intensive as Prime95, but still tax an Atom-based system pretty hard. It's therefore clear that installing an optical drive critically hinders airflow and the lack of space for adequate cooling is a serious design flaw.

Frankly, we’re desperately disappointed. We requested the Enigma in for review not to tear into it, but hopeful of an ultra compact and efficient Mini-ITX enclosure from a respected manufacturer – both Rich and I use Akasa cases at home and having just spent the weekend with my head inside an Akasa Omega fitting watercooling I still stand by it as one of the best cases out there.


Sadly the Akasa quality and design that has so impressed us in the past is totally absent in the Enigma, which has been ferociously over ambitious in its size and layout resulting in an inherently flawed product that makes far too many compromises. The poor drive layout and badly placed power delivery circuitry cause no end of problems and they mean the Engima really needs to go back to the drawing board. The lack of any fan mounts other than the single 40mm exhaust on the far side is also ludicrously optimistic and even an actively cooled CPU would struggle to keep itself cool in such cramped conditions, especially when it has to rely on the smallest of low profile coolers to even fit inside.

Moving the internal components around so that the drives sit below the motherboard, including a pair of 40mm cooling fans or making the case just slightly larger would have alleviated many of the more glaring flaws here and it’s enormously frustrating to see such serious issues become so plainly obvious during our testing process. Stuff like this should have been caught by QA long before the case even reached retailers' shelves.

While it might be fairly competitively priced in comparison to other Mini-ITX offerings at around the £60 mark, buying a slightly larger Mini-ITX case brings with it support for multiple 2.5” or even 3.5” and 5.25” drives, as well as better support for AM2 and LGA775 based Mini ITX boards. You can also buy Mini-ITX cases that support up to 9” full height graphics cards, allowing you to build a performance system into the smallest of cases. Even if all you want is low power, low desk space system there are better alternatives out there which don’t compromise so much in so many areas, and we'll be taking a look at more Mini-ITX cases in the future.

Final Thoughts

In short, the Akasa Enigma is a huge disappointment. Not only is it extraordinarily cramped inside, making building even an Atom based system into it a difficult job, but it is poorly designed to the point that it merrily cooked our 1.6GHz 8W Atom CPU to within an inch of its life before we finally pulled the plug. While it might look the part with its miniature dimensions, numerous compromises have been made to keep the case as small as possible and these are obviously apparent.

The result is a case that’s a liability when it comes to cooling and severely limited when it comes to features. Even if you're in the market for a no frills Mini-ITX chassis, it's definitely not worth searching for this black box.

• Build Quality
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• -
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• 5/10

• Features
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• 2/10

• Ease of Use
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• 3/10

• Performance
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• 1/10

• Value
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• 2/10

• Overall
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• 2/10

Score Guide