Akasa, while not the first name to mind in the case market has still been able to forge a reputation for excellent build quality and ease of use within its chassis range. Now it’s turning its eye towards the lucrative inexpensive “gamer case” market with the Infiniti ZOR, a steel chassis packing plenty of cooling in the form of three 120mm fans and enough space for even the beefiest of systems.
Thankfully though the ZOR isn’t just a featureless black box, with a large clear Perspex window built into the side panel just to show off your precious hardware inside. Whether you’re a case window person or not will depend on personal preference: this one is fitted flush to the side with multiple rivets rather than being glued and comes with protective peel on both sides to protect it from scratches during your build. However, the clear Perspex is very thin and feels a bit cheap, as do the plastic rivets that also lack style. While the side paneling and core chassis is steel, the ZOR’s front fascia is an amalgamation of a plastic frame, aluminum cladding and steel mesh, masking a rather nifty modular drive bay setup. Packing all the usual connectivity options like dual USB 2.0, Firewire 400, eSATA, mic and headphone ports recessed in behind a pop out cover, the front panel blanking plate can be moved to any other accommodating mount on the fascia panel, with all the internal cabling easily removed if unwanted thanks to the use of socketed cables.
While the insides of the ZOR are still plenty roomy for fitting even the meatiest of systems or graphics cards, with decent clearance on all sides of the motherboard and above the CPU allowing for the problem free fitting of even the fattest of CPU coolers, a removable motherboard tray would have been a great inclusion in this price range, especially as it’s right there, waiting to be taken advantage of! The 3-pin cables from the twin intake fans might also because you some problems – the cables just weren’t long enough for both to be connected to our test system’s 3-pin headers, and in the end we had to use a Molex to 3-pin adapter to have all three fans spinning simultaneously. The inclusion of a relatively inexpensive 3-pin extender or even just making the cables longer in the first place could easily have resolved the problem.
While idle operating temperatures for CPU and GPU are perfectly fine, around the performance of the similarly cooled Akasa Omega and Lian Li PC-9, it’s the GPU load test that’s a real problem. Using the case’s stock cooling solution is we recorded a GPU delta T value (the difference between the ambient temperature and the GPU temperature) of 59°C, a full 10°C more than the nearest competition. Overall we’ve been far from impressed with the Infiniti ZOR throughout our time with the case. While there isn’t too much wrong externally as long as the simple styling suits your tastes, the internals are a catalogue of compromises. The removable motherboard that isn’t, the woeful lack of cable routing, plenty of sharp edges and fan cables that just aren’t long enough are all frustrating problems. And while we really like the extremely flexible drive.
