Sunbeam Acrylic UFO Cube Case

Published on December 21, 2008
Written by Michael Larabel
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Installation:

The assembly instructions for the Sunbeam Acrylic UFO are printed on just three 8.5" x 11" pieces of paper. Assembling the case isn't too difficult, but these English-only instructions are written inconsistently and riddled with a variety of different grammatical and technical errors. They are still easy enough to follow, but it concerns us how haphazardly the instructions were created and whether other aspects of this product were also half-assed. Below are a few examples.

To put together this case it's basically a matter of screwing the acrylic sides to the base, attaching standoffs to the middle divider, and putting two vertical acrylic pieces in place that form the 3.5" and 5.25" drive bays. If following the assembly instructions, you will end up assembling the case fully, but then you will need to particularly disassemble the case again in order to install all of the hardware. When installing the hardware or changing out any of the components you will need to remove the top side of the case and the side opposite the power supply mount.

Resting in the bottom half of the Sunbeam Acrylic UFO Cube Case is the ATX power supply, up to two 5.25" drives, and above the external 5.25" drives is room for two 3.5" hard drives. On the top side is then room for an ATX motherboard and seven expansion slots. There are two 120mm fan mounts on the top side, but there are no cooling or even exhaust holes elsewhere with this case. There are just a few areas in the middle of the chassis to route cables between the bottom and top sides. The dimensions of this cube chassis are 300 x 295 x 380 mm. The front panel ports on this case include two USB 2.0 ports and two audio jacks (no eSATA or Firewire available).

Assembling this case and installing the hardware was an easy task though along the way we had problems with two of the holes on this chassis. One of the screw holes for attaching the I/O panel / expansion slot bracket was damaged and one of the acrylic brackets that reside in one of the corners of the case was also slightly damaged and couldn't have a screw inserted. The acrylic and parts making up this case aren't exactly high-end, so with further usage of this case, swapping out hardware, and any transporting of the computer would concern us even more with greater damage being likely.

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