Installation/Usability
First off, my smaller (330W), lower-end power supply didn’t have nearly enough plugs to both power the PC and all the extras that the case afforded. So I couldn’t use the lighting system without getting a new PS. Also, the 4-pin 12V cable from my PS was not nearly long enough to reach. In the previous case and in most that I’ve seen, the power supply is mounted near the top of the case, close to the 12V 4-pin plug side of the system board. However, in the Colossus the PS is mounted at the bottom meaning that many of your power cables need to be stretched pretty far to get them to where they need to go. It also meant that my 12V was about half the required length which meant that I had to find a solution on a Saturday evening, no small task in a city of only 100,000 people. Eventually I had to hack the plug to extend the cable length so that I could power up the system.
You probably won�t have to do anything of the sort with a more powerful, name brand power supply.
My MSI P45 mainboard has the SATA plugs on the lower 
right corner of the board. to get the cables to the drives there’s a nice pass through cable management system. But that same system also adds a lot of length to the trip and means some cables are stretched to their max with older, smaller PSUs.
I had to mount my DVD drive in the fourth slot down from the top to get the cables to it. Again, a new power supply would surely solve that as well as the fact I had to split some Molex out into SATA power so that I could drive both hard drives and my optical. In the previous configuration one of the drives had been in an external docking station. I thought that since I had the space I would put it inside the case.
The mounting for the the hard drives is screwless and they are supported in the drive cage by sort of snap-on plastic shelves with metal studs that slide into the screw holes in the hard drives themselves. I didn’t think it was an ideal solution but there has been no problem with the drives coming loose. The plastic shelves act as vibration dampeners and removed a lot of drive noise. In fact I was often surprised when I opened the front panel and saw that a drive was actually doing something as there was no audio evidence.
The feet on the case raise it off the ground a full 2cm meaning there’s ample space on the bottom for air flow which will be extremely important as that is where your power supply will be mounted and the fan will be facing down. The are round and made of hard black plastic with silver bands. They reminded me of the feet on my father’s very old Technics turntable and seems slightly out of place on the all white case. Then again, no one can see them so no worries. Also, the two back feet were loose while the front were not. I do not believe that was by design as I could see no real reason for it and so might have been a manufacturing flaw.
The two large fans did create some small amount of noise. Though this was to be expected as one is right at the top of the case and the other is inside the front panel. The two fans are the large 230mm fans which came with the case. The top fan is where my power supply was in the old case which is why I had power cable problems as mentioned above.
There are additional mount points for fans including a back panel 140mm space. The two large 230mm fans seemed to do a great job all on their own and I don’t have a massively overclocked system and only a single video card. The cooling was more than adequate.
The entire interior of the case is also painted white and features a nice cable management system. But again having to run some cables the length of
the case meant that my power supply wasn�t enough. It�s not a problem with the construction of the case but with the components being put into it. With properly thought out system design, instead of moving all our current components to the case, this would not be an issue.
The optical drives also have spring-loaded vibration dampeners so that you don’t need to use screws to mount the drives and increase the vibration potential. The mounting system is screwless (you can mount with screws if you need/want to) and the BitFenix symbols on the mounts are actually locks to hold the optical drives in place.
