Design & Features

The Viper is a very striking case to look at…there is absolutely no mistaking it for anybody else’s chassis. There was more propaganda at this point as well…hung from the side of the door reminding me again that I had in my hands the coolest case in existence. The lower portion of the front bezel is dominated by a large mesh intake and an LCD display. This unit shows system uptime (HH:MM), temperature (C or F), HDD activity, and alarms. It also has a large flashing Viper logo…we’ll have some video of that one in action later. The door is held in place by magnets and considering that it’s made of plastic has a nice feel to it. There’s a good sized indent on the inside to allow for fan control knobs, SP/DIF plugs, and whatever else might be sticking out from the four 5.25” and two 3.5” bays. The door also has another Viper logo, this time backlit with a red LED. Just above the door is a small plastic door which lifts to reveal the front panel ports as well as the fang shaped power and reset buttons. I honestly feel that this door is going to be the first piece to break on the Viper…it does not feel solid at all.

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The Windowed left side panel is also quite the attention grabber. The UV reactive window is shaped like the Viper logo as well as the meshed 80mm fan grille lower down. This was where quality control caught up to the Viper, as at least two of the rivets that secure the window to the panel were not even glued in like the others were. If you have a glue gun on hand, this is an easy fix…but it shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

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Around the rear of the case I found that this Viper differed from the ones I’d seen in print. Apparently there is an early run of the Viper that features a dual 80mm exhaust, but the newer ones have a single mount that can accommodate an 80, 92, or 120mm fan. The red paint that totally covers the internal chassis is visible here as well as the ultra cheap knock out PCI covers. You’d probably be better off removing all of them and adding some replaceable ones, just to keep the PCI slots matching. I would have liked to see that from the factory as well. There is a plastic piece that fits over the rear of the case to provide a way to route your cables in a somewhat neat fashion. This attaches using extra long thumb screws that go all the way through to the chassis itself and also secures the side panels. The flip up handle provides a good grip to pull the left panel off of the case.

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Here’s the part where I want you to recall that the box wasn’t damaged. At some point this box was dropped hard enough to cause the Power Supply to bend in the Steel chassis right at the mount…look carefully at the power supply screw in the upper left hand of the picture. Although steel, the Viper is not a really heavy case. The trade off is that the steel is pretty thin and bends with minimal effort. The result is as you see here. This could be an issue if you’re moving this chassis around a lot…any decent power supply is going to weigh quite a bit and could easily cause this kind of bending if you’re not careful.

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The right panel is boring, but now would be a good time to talk about the paint job on the rest of the case. It’s a high gloss black and looks pretty sharp. It is not show car quality paint (I own a show car…I know what the paint looks like!) but it is very good looking. A little bit of work with some rubbing compound and some wax would really make it shine. The word “Viper” is written vertically down the leading edges of both panels and it is a nice touch.

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On top there are two metal handles to provide a good way to pick up and move the case. As I shuffle a lot of these around my office I immediately liked the feature. The vent is also functional and allows hot air to escape. I’ve seen this sort of venting before on other cases and it is surprisingly effective.

Pulling off the side panel takes a lot of effort…I was almost convinced I’d damage something doing it. This is caused by the full paint job on the interior which makes the panels stick more than most are probably used to seeing. Once inside I was impressed with the red paint work…it definitely adds to the custom appearance of this chassis.

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First thing that I looked at was the power supply and I was shocked to see that the impact that had damaged the outside had also been enough to bend the little shelf that is supposed to prevent that sort of thing from happening! I removed the power supply and bent the pieces of metal back the way they were supposed to go…it wasn’t hard to do. On a gaming case, having some kind of tool free system is almost a given and I was a little disappointed to see that the Viper does things old school. There are plenty of holes to work with for hiding cables, and it’s fairly open inside so the install should go pretty smoothly. A lone red LED 80mm is preinstalled at the intake, but like the exhaust it can accommodate a 92 or 120mm fan as well. There was also a small box inside the case with a bag of hardware, a handy little piezo speaker header, a colorful instruction manual and a sheet of quick set up instructions.

One nifty little item in here was the power supply. Although is not a power house it is certainly no slacker either. Hands down this is the best unit I’ve ever seen bundled up with a case from the factory. With an all black paint job and black fans, it’ll fit right in to the Viper’s theme as well. The numbers on the sticker look promising and I’ll be sure to load test this unit once I get the system installed.

So, I proceeded to dismantle the front of the chassis. It is pretty easy to remove which will make sleeving all these cables up much easier in the future. There is a small circuit board located behind the front LCD, and on it there are two items of interest. The first is a jumper used to select either Celsius or Fahrenheit and the second is a pass through for the HDD indicator on the front panel. This caused me some consternation, as MGE has not provided the cable to connect the motherboard header to this panel. You’ll have to scrounge one up or fabricate one in order for that function to work. The Viper actually does have standard Power and HDD lights although they are at the very bottom of the front bezel and almost unnoticeable unless they’re powered on. The red Power indicator is just fine, but the green HDD LED should probably have been red as well.

After totally reassembling the system, I wired in a jumper and fired up the Viper to get a feel for the noise level. Although not silent, it is certainly close. Considering that there are only four fans inside, that is almost expected. We’ll have to see how it does with a full system.

Next: Installation & Performance