Exterior
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The front of the case is mostly glossy black. Personally, I can’t say I’m a huge fan of gloss, because of how easily finger prints and other marks show up. We can see that only one of the front USB ports is USB3, while the other is a USB2. Having two USB3 ports and supplying an adapter for older motherboards would be preferable. Although not available in the Australian market at the time of writing, Gigabyte does offer a version of this case with two USB 3.0 ports. The indent at the bottom of the case glows red when the computer is running, as we will see later. Unlike most cases, the access panel is actually the right side panel. It contains two fan vents which can support either 120mm or 140mm fans.
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The rear of the case has a single 120mm fan vent. The grille is reasonably open, but it would be preferable to use the same honeycomb structure as the side vents. The expansion slot covers are the stamped kind that you have to snap off to remove. The missing cover was removed by me, as it will have to come out for my PC. Having the screw-in covers would have been preferable, since they can be re-installed if need be. There are also two holes for water cooling pipes – another feature not often present on lower cost cases. The left hand side panel is plain black.
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The top of the case comes with two 120mm fans installed. We’ll see later how quiet they are and how well they cool. The bottom of the case contains a vent for the power supply, but it did not come with a filter. I don’t like installing the power supply with the fan facing down when there is no filter, because it will suck up far too much dust, so I will install it with the fan facing up.
Before we get on to the interior, I should mention that the case only uses 0.5mm thick steel. This is somewhat thin, considering that a lot of cases, even in the same price bracket, use 0.8mm or even 1mm thick steel. As a result, the X10 doesn’t feel as solid. That said, it’s still better than the 0.4mm or even 0.3mm thick steel that some cheap generic cases use, such as the one I will be comparing this case’s cooling capabilities to a bit later on.
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