Here is the basic system I assembled in the tower, just to give you an idea of how things will fit. Included in the tower are:

• Aopen AX34Pro-II Socket370 VIA 133a mainboard

• Intel Celeron2-600 @ 1009mhz, courtesy of Overclockwarehouse.com

• Chaintech RIA2 Geforce2MX 32meg AGP video card (article soon)

• Sohoware MX 10/100 PCI Ethernet.

• Maxtor DiamondMax UDMA-66 13.6G IDE HDD

• Toshiba 6x/32x DVD drive

• And let's not forget the 3.5" floppy drive up top.

The AOpen AX34Pro-II is a somewhat large ATX mainboard, and is still a drop in fit, if one decides to skip removing the board tray for installation. You can see with the skimpy amount of components I had here to shove in it, I'm no where near doing justice to this cases potential. Certainly with 11 drive bays still free, you would have lots of options open here. :)

Well, despite a few missing features I have come to love, namely screwless case design, and drive rails, I am quite pleased with this cases design. This is clearly not your average case, so a few feature tradeoffs I'm used to, for the MASSIVE amounts of room this case affords, and incredible strength of the chassis seem to be well worth it. It would have been nice of AOpen to add some case fans to the 3 80mm spots in the case, but with this case hovering around $90-$100 in price, you wont break the budget buying a few case fans to add in to it. Certainly for those of you who need this type of space, and have a desk this mutha will fit under, the AOpen HX08 Tower is a bargain.

Pros:

• ROOM! If you need more than 13 drive bays, you need therapy.

• A removable board tray that isn't flimsy as crap. 

• Solid, Athlon approved 300w power supply standard.

• Rigid, "cut-free" construction.

• Value. For this kind of space, and this kind of build quality, it's an excellent value.

Cons:

• Not a screwless design. A nitpick perhaps, but I'm spoiled.

• No drive mounting rails. Another nitpick perhaps. Ditto. ;)

Rating: 9/10

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