Raidmax Iceberg Case Review
By Gabriel Torres on July 8, 2008

Introduction

Iceberg is an all-aluminum mid-tower case from Raidmax featuring four 5 ¼” bays, four internal 3 ½” bays and four 120-mm fans, coming with a terrific price tag of only USD 150 (a bargain for an all-aluminum case) and targeted to mainstream users. Let’s take an in-depth look on this case from Raidmax.

Iceberg can come in two different colors, black or silver. We reviewed the black version. This case uses a different opening mechanism where the side panels are removed by moving them from top to bottom instead of from front to rear; pay attention to the latches present on the side panels.

Raidmax Iceberg Case
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Figure 1: Raidmax Iceberg case.

Raidmax Iceberg Case
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Figure 2: Raidmax Iceberg case.

On 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 four 5 ¼” bays – which is more than enough for mainstream users – and the top 5 ¼” bay come with an optical drive “fake” cover, which is great: your optical drive will be installed behind this masks making its “face” to be all aluminum. You can even install a beige drive that it won’t make any difference to the aesthetics of the case, as the mask will cover it. You need to remove the front panel to install optical drives, as we will explain later.

As you can also see, this case does not provide an external 3 ½” bay for floppy disk drives and it doesn’t come with any kind of adaptor. This is really frustrating. The funny thing is that on Raidmax’s website the manufacturer says that this case comes with two adaptors, which isn’t true.

On Figure 3 you can also see one of the 120-mm fans that come with the case. This one is attached to the hard disk drive cage and we will talk more about it later.

Raidmax Iceberg Case
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Figure 3: Front panel.

Introduction (Cont’d)

On Figure 4 you see the case top panel with its radiator-like shape, where you can find two 120-mm fans (that glow in blue when turned on). These fans, like the other two fans that come with this case, use a standard four-pin peripheral power plug, not allowing you to control or monitor their speed.

Raidmax Iceberg Case
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Figure 4: Top panel.

On the top panel you can also find a panel containing two USB ports, one Firewire (IEEE1394) port, mic in and headphones jacks, plus the power and reset switches and HDD and power LEDs. This case could offer one eSATA port in our opinion, but maybe Raidmax didn’t include one to keep its cost down (what in the end of the day was a good decision). The main problem with this panel is that the two USB ports are two close to each other, preventing you from using them at the same time if you have two “fat” devices – USB drives, for example.

Raidmax Iceberg Case
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Figure 5: Connectors, switches and LEDs available on the top panel.

Finally we have the rear panel on Figure 6. It uses the traditional ATX layout, with the power supply on the top and seven expansion slots. Here you can see the fourth 120-mm fan and also two holes for water cooling systems. These holes are protected by a rubber mechanism, so you won’t need to break anything on your case to make these holes available.

Raidmax Iceberg Case
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Figure 6: Rear panel.

Let’s see how Iceberg looks like inside.

Inside Iceberg

This case uses a different opening mechanism. Instead of sliding the side panels to the back of the case to open it, you need to press two latches and slide the panel down in your direction to remove each side panel. We’ve seen a similar mechanism being used on Sigma Unicorn, but on this case from Sigma the side panels are kept attached to the case after you open them, thing that doesn’t occur on Iceberg.

Even though you can remove both side panels the motherboard tray is permanently attached to the chassis.

Raidmax Iceberg Case
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Figure 7: Removing one of the side panels.

On Figure 8 you can see the left side panel, which has a small transparent window.

Raidmax Iceberg Case
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Figure 8: Left side panel.

On Figure 9 you have an overall look on the interior of Raidmax Iceberg.

Raidmax Iceberg Case
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Figure 9: Inside Raidmax Iceberg.

This case doesn’t use a screwless mechanism to fasten daughter boards to the case, but on the other hand it provides thumbscrews, allowing fastening cards without the need of using tools anyway. In fact we personally prefer this approach, as we’ve seen countless times these screwless mechanisms breaking because they are usually manufactured using cheap plastic. On Figure 10 you can also see the rear fan. This and all other fans use the traditional peripheral power connector, meaning that you can’t monitor the fan speed.

Raidmax Iceberg Case
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Figure 10: Rear 120-mm fan and thumbscrews for fastening daughter boards.

The Disk Drive Bays

This case has four external 5 ¼” bays, two internal 5 ¼” bays and four internal 3 ½” bays for hard disk drives inside a cage. The sample we got didn’t come with any 5 ¼”-to-3 ½” adaptor so you can’t install floppy disk drives on this case. Even worse, the two internal 5 ¼” bays are completely useless, as you can’t install hard disk drives on them as well without adaptors. Maybe the manufacturer forgot to include these adaptors in the sample they sent us?

Raidmax Iceberg Case
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Figure 11: Disk drive bays, internal view.

As you can see no screwless mechanism is used to fasten drives to the bays, but on the other hand this case comes with lots of thumbscrews with both thin thread (metallic, for the optical drives) and thick thread (black, for the hard disk drives), so you won’t need to use a screwdriver to attach drives to the case. In fact you won’t need a screwdriver to open the case, to attach daughter boards, to attach the power supply (you can use the black thumbscrews) or to attach drives and you can also use thumbscrews to attach the motherboard to its tray! So unless you have more than one optical drive you won’t need a screwdriver to build your PC!

Raidmax Iceberg Case
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Figure 12: Thumbscrews.

For installing optical drives you will need to remove the front panel first, what is done by pulling a handle located on the bottom of the case. The first bay has the abovementioned mask and you won’t need any tool to install the drive. But if you want to install drives in the other bays you will need to remove the covers located in front of each bay, which are screwed to the front panel.

Raidmax Iceberg Case
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Figure 13: Handle for removing the front panel.

Raidmax Iceberg Case
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Figure 14: Front panel removed from the case.

The hard disk drive bays are located inside a removable cage, which is attached to the case using thumbscrews. To remove this cage you also need to remove the front panel first. Even though the hard disk drive cage comes installed on the bottom of the case, you can move it to upper bays, if you’d like to. The frontal 120-mm fan is attached to the hard disk drive cage and it glows blue when it is turned on.

Raidmax Iceberg Case
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Figure 15: Hard disk drive cage.

Raidmax Iceberg Case
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Figure 16: Hard disk drive cage.

Main Features

Iceberg case main specs include:

* Researched at Newegg.com on the day we published this review.

Conclusions

Raidmax Iceberg is an all-aluminum case targeted to the average user. Here is a summary of what we found about this case.

Strong Points

Weak Points

In summary, this case provides a terrific cost/benefit ratio for mainstream users looking for an all-aluminum case. Costing USD 150 in the USA it is a bargain for a case manufactured using this noble material. High-end users, however, may want more features, especially fan monitoring and control and more hard disk drive bays. More exigent users will also prefer to have a case that uses better-quality parts that won’t break when building the PC. If you need these features then you should look for another (and more expensive) product. So even though this case provides a great value we can’t recommend a product that will break while you are building your PC.

Originally at http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/579

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