In-Win GRone product reviews

Now my old PC case was getting a bit beat up and so it was time for an upgrade, and what an upgrade it is. This new offering from In-Win is an absolute beast of a case, and yet it is also the most well thought out and designed case that I have seen for a long time.

One of the very first things that I noticed was it's size, in fact it was easily and extra 25% larger than my old NZXT Nemesis case, so I did panic a fraction and was wondering if it would fit in the space that my old PC had previously occupied, and with a bit of gentle hammer-like persuasion I made room for it. Another fact that I hadn't noticed at first was where the PSU went, it seems that it is now the in thing to have your PSU mounted at the bottom of the case, not the top. Now i'm assuming that the reason for this is something to do with thermo-dynamics and the whole heat rises to the top thing.

Now speaking of heat rising to the top, well there is little chance of any heat issues with this case as it comes with a total of 5 fans prefitted, you only have to make sure that your motherboard has enough system fan plugs on it, or your PSU has enough connectors to run them all, then of course there is the fact that it can support up to 10 fans. That's enough of a breeze to keep most things cool. Of course if that's not cool enough for you, or if you are a mad overclocker then the case is apparently designed to support watercooling as well.

Inside the case is nice and roomy and makes the fitting of your motherboard and associated cards nice and easy, although in this day of screwless design I was pleasantly surprised to see that they had gone back to using screws to hold the backplanes of the expansion cards in position. Another thing that makes the case look roomy is the great cable management system that they have put in place. They have cut oblong slots into the motherboard backing plate at intervals around the motherboard area and have then fitted some rubber grommets into the slots, at first I wasn't sure how that would work until I took off the other side of the case and I saw that they had expanded the room between the motherboard backing plate and the case side to allow you to run all your cables there. This means that the only time you see your cables is when they come up from underneath to either plug into your motherboard or into your other devices. And they have used this to great advantage with the holders for the 3.5" drives. Like most new cases these are side mounted, however in this case you insert them into small caddies, but backwards so that the connectors are facing away from you and positioned perfectly to make use of the cable management system.

It was as I was connecting all the cables that I spotted another unique feature of the new generation of cases, it has an e-SATA connector located externally on top of the case so you can plug in a temporary extra SATA HDD if you need to without the need to open up your case and fiddle around with the wiring.

Once I had installed all the parts and had it all connected up I fired it and I was nicely surprised at just how quiet it was considering all the fans located in it (and yes I had enough connectors to hook them all up ). So now it is running smooth as silk and in fact since the change over it has been crashing less, so maybe the new PSU and case has given it a bit of a new lease of life. (But knowing me i'll upgrade the guts again in about 2-3 months anyway.)

I really liked my old case as it had a certain look about it, but I just love this new one. It just looks great (it's stylish but still has a bit of 'look at me again and i'll rip your head off' attitude to it) and is quiet, what more could you want in a PC case?