Apevia X-QPack

Written by Wil Harris

December 12, 2006 | 12:17

Tags: #apevia #atx #factor #form #micro #review #small #system

Companies: #shuttle

Internals

Apevia X-QPack Internals Apevia X-QPack Internals
The case has a one-piece lid, as is common with SFF systems. Unfortunately, the metal it is made out of is very, very thin aluminium, which makes it extremely bendy and not at all liable to any kind of knock. The fact that the majority of the surface of the cover is made out of acrylic doesn't really help either, given that the acrylic is also wafer thin. Once you've taken this casing on and off a few times, you're going to start having some problems with lasting bending.

Apevia X-QPack Internals Apevia X-QPack Internals
Moving inside the chassis, we can get a clearer idea of how this is laid out. There are two 'levels' to the case, and the top rear is occupied by an included 420W PSU (that is smaller than a standard ATX unit) and the 120mm fan. We didn't perform any hardcore testing on the unit, but we always find you can judge the quality of a PSU by its weight - and this one was light as a feather. However, it could well be enough to keep you running, providing you're not going to tax it too hard, and with a single 80mm in the rear, it is at least quiet.

The drive bays are riveted in place, which means you won't be able to screw in your preferred set of devices outside of the case, unlike the various Shuttle systems we've seen recently. The is especially annoying, given that...

Apevia X-QPack Internals Apevia X-QPack Internals
Massive points for adding something awesome to the SFF genre - removable motherboard tray! For the longest time we have been begging for this, since assembling components in a Shuttle case can require, at best, nimble fingers and, at worst, bone-wrenching surgery. The ability to pull out a tray and affix all the stuff you need outside the box is an enormous bonus.

The power supply comes with the usual array of cables, although there are only four 4-pin molex connectors, one SATA power connector and no PCI-Express connectors - not really great given that there is space to run two hard drives and two graphics cards in this chassis. Probably best, however, given the limited capacity of the PSU.
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