Two thumb screws make it easy to get the Cobra’s side off and bare all. Upon opening it up the first thing to catch your eye is the large CPU cooler required to keep the i3-530 at 4GHz. We shall later see how well the cooler performs but as mentioned earlier there is room for an exhaust fan. Next you can see how the cables are laid out, while not routed behind the motherboard tray like many enthusiasts like to, they are cable tied together to avoid them harbouring cooling performance.


The view once opened...

Moving onto the components, CCL have favoured removing the tool less mounting methods for both the hard drive and DVD drive preferring two screws on each side. A reason for this decision may well be both are better secured for transit. As can be seen by the picture, there is plenty of room for more optical drives or other 5.25” bay devices as well as more hard drives or even an SSD! The Gigabyte motherboard has 5 SATAII ports, two of which are taken up by the LG DVD drive and Hitachi HDD, leaving three unused. One of these is blocked by XFX’s egg shaped cooler on the 5770 leaving two accessible and unused.


The Ripjaws in situ

Looking from the top of the case towards the CPU cooler

In terms of expansion, the Eclipse Cobra allows for mild upgrades. A single PCI slot and PCIe x4 slot reside below the 5770 though placing anything in the PCI will practically be up against the graphics card’s cooler. Along the bottom of the motherboard are spare headers for more USB ports and a 1394 header. The system comes with 4GB of DDR3 RAM, rated at 1600MHz (CAS9) but there are two slots for another dual channel kit. The Cooler Master 460W power supply has plenty of connectors and grunt to support any of these upgrades. Should that not be enough, CCL will allow you to upgrade power supply all the way up to Corsair’s HX1000! Though, of course, this does come at a cost.


Limited expansion opportunities and SATA access

Now we’ve had a look at the interior and exterior, let’s see how the Eclipse Cobra performs…