| Ultra Products Aluminus ATX Case
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Installation (continued):
Mounting the motherboard was a joy due to the removable motherboard tray. The stand offs were already in place and in this case even mounted in the correct spots to line up with our DFI motherboard. The rest of the install went well. The AGP graphics card, rear exhaust fan, and power supply all lined up easily and fit perfectly. The only issue we had was with the mounting of the DVD drive. Our Creative drive has a rather big drawer button that protrudes from the dive further than most. When the drive was mounted flush with the front bezel, closing the door would hit the button causing the DVD drawer to open. We had to mount the drive ever so slightly recessed to cure this small problem. However any devices such as fan controllers that have knobs protruding may have some issues here.
Over all the Ultra Products Aluminus is a big roomy case with a well thought out design and precision construction making it a joy to work in.
 
The duct on the side panel lined up perfectly over the top of the CPU cooler with only about a ¼" gap between the two. I could foresee this being an issue with bigger or taller CPU coolers, but in our case it worked out perfectly.
Performance:
In my eyes there are two factors to consider when talking about case performance. How well it cools, and how much noise it makes in doing so. As mentioned before, this system had been living in the Raidmax Ninja case, and since both use 120mm intake and exhaust fans I expected cooling to be similar. I actually pulled the two 120mm fans from the Ninja case to use in the Aluminus case.
The two cases do differ in that the Ninja has an 80mm fan in the side window and the Aluminus has a CPU duct and VGA vent, but no fan at all on the side panel. I was very anxious to see how this difference would effect cooling. I'll be honest, I thought the fan of the Ninja would result in lower case and CPU temps than the CPU duct of the Aluminus. As the graph below points out, I was wrong.
The cooling duct and VGA vent system of the Aluminus actually cooled better and did so with less noise due to one less 80mm case fan. It should be noted temperatures were taken with the system under full CPU load from running Folding@Home along with Quake 4 for approximately 2 hours. Hardware Doctor Software from DFI was used to take temperature readings.
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