Xigmatek Octans Review

Interior

Both side panels, the base and roof all slide off providing easy access to the interior. You may have noticed already that there's a PSU pass-through power cable at the rear of the case and this is to cater for the fact the PSU is installed at the front. The rear of the PSU actually faces the front of the case and the PSU mount and protruding power cable are the main reason for the bulbous front section - despite our initial assumptions, you can't actually install any fans or drives here.


There are two main drive mounts but options are fairly limited. The front drive mount can house a single 2.5in SSD or a 3.5in hard disk, while a removable plate at the rear can play host to a single 3.5in drive. It's not quite as elaborate as some of its competitors and your needs may differ but seeing as most PCs will likely sport a single SSD and hard disk, the Octans ticks this particular box.


With the PSU at the front of the case, rather than sitting on top of the motherboard like the Elite 130, installing all your hardware is noticeably easier, especially when it comes to plugging in power cables. The PSU mount is obviously compatible with ATX PSUs but Xigmatek has also included an adaptor to allow SFX PSUs to be used as well. The latter wouldn't improve anything in terms of cooling or component clearance, but could make it easier to build a system with more space to play with.


Dual-slot graphics cards are supported and are well catered for too, with the side vents allowing air to pass straight through to the GPU cooler. There's 300mm of clearance for graphics cards too, thanks to the fact they have the entire internal length to play with down the side of the PSU. CPU coolers on the other hand only have 140mm of clearance, although this is considerably more than the 65mm of space offered by the Cooler Master Elite 130 - again thanks to the front-mounted PSU. That said, like the Elite 130, there are few cable routing options, other than to bung the excess bits into the front section above the PSU


The roof section is yet another slightly disappointing addition to the Octans as you can't fit anything up there due to the sloping design - not even a 120mm fan is possible. However, due to the extra CPU clearance, it is possible, just, to install a single 120mm fan all-in-one liquid cooler, with the rear 3.5in mounting plate also acting as a 120mm fan mount, although you'll obviously lose the ability to mount a hard disk here if you do this.

Out of the box cooling is pretty thin, with just a single 80mm fan in the rear of the case. However, as we've already mentioned, the GPU can probably look after itself being placed right next to a side vent and the rest of the case is well ventillated.