On Figure 4 you can see the front panel from Spedo. This case doesn’t have a door. All bay covers are meshed with a dust filter installed on each one of them. Between these covers and the case itself there is no metallic plate blocking the airflow, a mistake several other case manufacturers make and forget to tell users that they need to break and remove these plates in order to really improve the case airflow (notice that we are talking here about cases with meshed covers; for cases with solid covers it won’t make any difference whether you remove these plates or not). So these meshed covers will really improve the case internal airflow.
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Figure 4: Front panel.
The traditional USB ports and audio jacks are located on the top of the case and here we saw a miracle. The two USB ports that come with this case are very far away from each other, so you won’t have any problem installing two “fat” USB devices at the same time. This case also comes with one eSATA port. For a case with a list price of USD 250 we expected more here, at least four USB ports and one Firewire port.
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Figure 5: Connectors on the top panel.
This case comes with another 230-mm fan on the top panel, which is great. However, just like the side fan, this fan is listed as being a 230-mm unit but it uses 190-mm blades, making it to be on the same size of “smaller” fans, like the 200-mm fan used on Antec Twelve Hundred. Like the side fan the top fan rotates at 800 rpm and has no speed control and uses a standard four-pin peripheral power connector, not allowing you to monitor its speed thru your motherboard.
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Figure 6: Top panel.
On Figure 6 we have the rear panel. On this case the power supply is installed on the lower part of the case. On the top part you can see the two rear 120-mm fans (1,300 rpm, no monitoring, no speed control) and also two holes for external water cooling systems. These holes are protected by rubber covers, so you don’t need to break anything on Spedo in order to use them. The screwless mechanism to hold daughter boards is located outside on the rear panel and we will talk more about it later.
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Figure 7: Rear panel.
Let’s now see how Spedo Advance Package looks like inside.
