A+ Black Pearl is an all-aluminum full tower case from Tagan featuring seven 5 ¼” bays (one comes with a 3 ½” adapter for installing a floppy disk drive) and eight internal 3 ½” bays, a panel for controlling the speed of up to four fans and also to monitor the temperature of any device you’d like (the CPU or the GPU are the two most common choices) thru a thermal sensor that comes with the product, and plenty of room for installing a redundant power supply. Let’s take an in-depth look at this high-end product from Tagan.
The first thing you will notice about this case is that it is inverted compared to traditional cases. Usually the motherboard is installed on the right side of the case and we need to open the left panel to build our PC. On A+ Black Pearl this is reversed: the motherboard is installed on the left side of the case and you will need to open the right panel to build your PC. Half the right panel is meshed to help on the cooling.
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Figure 1: Tagan A+ Black Pearl case.
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Figure 2: Tagan A+ Black Pearl case.
In Figure 3, you can see the front panel from this case. As you can see, this case doesn’t have a door. This case has seven 5 ¼” bays and the two top bays come with optical drive “fake” covers, which is great: your optical drives will be installed behind these masks making their “faces” to be all aluminum. You can even install beige drives that it won’t make any difference to the aesthetics of the case, as these masks will cover them.
The 3 ½” adapter for floppy disk drives that comes installed on the lowest 5 ¼” bay also comes with a mask for floppy disk drives, so your floppy disk drive will gain a black aluminum face. The only problem is that if you don’t have a floppy disk drive your case will still have this mask installed, i.e., you will have an ugly hole on your front panel. One solution would be moving one of the 5 ¼” covers to the lowest bay and installing an optical drive without its mask (if you use only one or two 5 ¼” bays). If you will use more than two 5 ¼” bays then this problem is solved as you will have to remove one of the covers anyway, and you can replace the floppy cover with this unused cover.
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Figure 3: Front panel.
On the front panel you can also find the fan control panel. This panel monitors and controls the speed of up to four fans and you can also monitor the temperature of one device, as this case comes with one thermal sensor. This case comes with two 120 mm fans and two optional 120 mm fans, so the number of monitoring and controlling channels is perfect.
