SpineRex has been a long time coming and I know quite a few have been anticipating its release for many months now but how does it fare?

Visually SpineRex is a great looking case but it has some strange design concepts. Cooling breaks out of the traditional fan placement and lacks a rear exhaust and top mounted fan. Due to the narrowness of SpineRex the 250mm fan on the side panel had to be removed as it was touching the CPU cooler we use in our test bench for cases, thus leaving only dual 120mm fans at the front to cool the entire system. Only having intakes and no exhaust fans causes cooling inadequacies and its clear to see this from the thermal performance results on the previous page.



It doesn’t stop there either, I found the cable management awkward and unforgiving. Behind the motherboard tray there are just a few millimetres of clearance between the motherboard tray and side panel - causing issues with storing cables here. The lack of space and large cut-out around the PSU meant that cables were not hidden but always on display – my feeble attempt to tidy the cables coming from the PSU were limited to just using a cable tie around all of the cables.

Priced at around £100 inc. VAT SpineRex is one of the cheaper full-tower cases available on the market. As much as I love the Enermax brand with its strong PSUs and brilliant cooling fans I cannot help but feel disappointed by their latest case offering - the SpineRex. It looks great but falls foul to pointless design concepts and OEM type quality. The phrase that comes to mind is: “Style over substance”.