We do wish that there was some sort of dust screen at the bottom, however. The blue LED casts a subtle glow under the case and out of the slits that flank the sides that looks great in the dark. The case has just one fan mounting point at the bottom, so we positioned the fan to pull in cool air to help keep the CPU and GPU in check under load. The PC-Q01A doesn't come with a case fan, so we ordered a blue SilenX fan so we could get some sort of airflow inside. It's not particularly hard to build into, but when you finally go to mount your PSU, the case seems to shrink. To say that the space inside this case is tight would be an understatement. That said, this case is small and devoid of all but the most basic features.Ĭases don't get much more claustrophobic than this.
Clean lines without a lot of mumbo-jumbo to distract from it make this case look more like a classy accent piece that will feel at home in any room. This case is made of aluminum and reminds us of Apple's styling choices in the past few years. In a fit of design-inspired insanity, we looked for the smallest, most unobtrusive case that we could fit an ATX power supply in. The other big change we made was in the case. So if there's one gotcha with this mobo, it's the M.2 support. Alas, we had dig up a 2.5-inch 850 Evo to get the system installed and working. Seeing as PCIe-mode M.2 SSDs are more expensive than their M.2 SATA counterparts, a simple substitution wasn't really in the cards at this price point. This holds especially true because the product specs (opens in new tab) don't necessarily imply that SATA isn't supported, only that PCIe 3.0 is. This struck us as odd, since most boards that offer M.2 support SATA as a fallback mode for people who don't have PCIe or NVMe SSDs. As it turns out, the M.2 support is limited to the PCIe bus, and doesn't offer SATA-mode support. Try as we might, we couldn't get the mobo to see the M.2 drive. At first, we paired the board with an M.2 250GB Samsung 850 Evo, but were met with a system that couldn't see any storage.
We wanted to find a board that supported M.2, since we prefer to not run two extra cables if we don't have to. The second thing this board has is an M.2 slot. This gutshot of the build shows how everything fits together, sans the 2.5-inch SSD and PSU.
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