The Centurion

My new system was fitted into a Coolermaster Centurion casing, which I promptly assumed to be a primarily showy piece that's quite impractical to take down and clean out with any sort of frequency. Well, I'm glad that I was dead wrong about that.

I had to take it apart to give my ram another upgrade, and then I noticed the metal plates blocking the drive bays. Now, all casings have some form of these: The thin plates that must be pulled out in order to fit new drives in. Unfortunately, try as I might, I really couldn't remove them. Obviously, I had to take the pesky front panel out, and I had no clue as to how I would go about doing that. The front panel appeared to be fixed in place with plastic split knobs, and no visible screws. I assumed that the knobs were a PITA to deal with. The wires were running out of it and I was loathe to have them come out.

Then I tried tugging on the front panel. It gave slightly, so I tugged a bit harder to see how I would remove it. Then the entire panel came out in my hand. The first thing I noticed was the elegance of the design, since the wired parts were actually set into a separate panel. That meant that I could easily take the casing apart to remove the grills and free up the drive bays, and to remove those pesky metal plates which were interfering with my airflow.

After successfully removing the plates, I noted that the airflow was significantly improved. For one, the entire front panel is now a completely freed intake. Frankly, I don't know why the early casings weren't designed this way. During the days of relatively low power computing, the generous front intake could easily allow for passive cooling. Ah, well. I like my Centurion =p