CHENBRO CH11L-BK Review

Intro

Chenbro has been making high quality industrial cases for quite some time.  One of their more popular cases is the Chenbro Genie tower.  Many an overclocker uses this case as it offers lots of room to work and modify and it is extremely well made.  I was looking at purchasing a rack-mount case though, not a tower as I have plenty of those.  I first went to Newegg to see if they had anything that would interest me but their rack-mount case pickings weren't that great.  I looked at Chenbro's site and found a model I really liked and went on Pricewatch to see what stores offered it.  I found it on a site called Logical Plus and got it a few days later.  I was looking for a 4U case with four 3.5" hard drive bays (this has four internal, three external) and two or three 5.25" bays (this has three 5.25").  So this case looked like a great choice and with a price tag of $153 it seemed about right.

Features and Thoughts

When I got this case, the box it came in first off was mammoth.  And good lord was it heavy!  I was wanting an extremely heavy duty industrial case, as this case is what my main work computer will be inhabiting and I could tell I picked a winner!  The case comes with the regular accessories such as (a lot of) screws and misc. parts.  When opening the case the first thing I noticed was that the motherboard tray (non-removable) had about 8 billion holes in it.  So rest assured if you have some whacky motherboard, it WILL fit in this case as there is a ton of room (and holes).

The first thing that I did once in the case was remove all three drive cages in the case.  There is a 5.25" cage with three bays and one of the bays has a 3.5" mounting option as well.  Also on top of this cage there is a spot to mount a hard drive.  This top mounted hard drive is very interesting!  When you close the case door, the panel is resting on top of the hard drive so the heat from the hard drive hits the panel and cools the drive!  Also, you only have to screw in one side in, as the other side of the hard drive is locked in with two little metal hooks.  The second cage houses two 3.5" external drives.  The third cage which holds three hard drives is located behind a 120mm intake fan so if you've got some hot 10k or 15k rpm drives, you'd want them mounted there.  Every cage has padding for noise cancellation and anti-vibration.  In the pictures below you can see pictures of the padding on the case and cages.

As for the front of the case it's pretty streamlined.  When the door is closed it has a very Death Star / Utilitarian look to it.  As you can see you have your two case handles as this is a rack case, but if you choose to you can easily remove them and put the case upright.  You'd probably say, why would you want to do that?  Well when you do, it's about as tall as a Dell XPS T500 (a mid-tower).  But then it's very long for a tower from front to back.   If you were to take this case and put its front on the floor it would look like your average Antec tower or whatever have you.  But because this is a rack-mount and it's really meant to be that, when you make it a tower it looks rather different and in my opinion, quite cool!

There are also a few nice electrical touches to this case.  They include a swivel power switch (like a PSU switch but it snaps back) and they include a button that isn't a reset button (something else), but they also give you a reset button in a plastic bag.  You can use this custom button, or you can use the reset button.  I'm not really sure what the custom button is for though. :\  In any case, you have five green LED's on the front--three custom ones, and then power, and hard drive activity.  The last electrical component is sensor that clicks when you close the door, and if your motherboard supports the "case open/close" feature you can use this!  It doesn't really make much sense.  I mean, you can kind of tell if your case door is open or closed :P  But I guess if you have a computer running mission critical applications for your business, and someone opens up the case that shouldn't, the system admin could see that someone is working on it and could tell them to stop.  That's just a guess as to what could happen.  You can think up other scenarios.

Pictures

External 2 X 3.5" removable cage	External 2 X 3.5" cage cushioning	Internal 3 X 3.5" hard drive cage	External 3 X 5.25" removable cage	External 3 X 5.25" cage cushioning
The back ( 80mm fan, 60mm fan optional )	Front, 120mm fan and lockable door	Front with flash	Door open, note the 5.25/3.5" converter	Overview shot

Next Page - More Features / Conclusion