Nanoxia DS6 Deep Silence 6 Review

Up Close:  Interior Overview and Drive bays

How many cable management holes?  1,2,3,4,5….11,12..S#!t loads that’s how many.  And how many CPU cooler motherboard cut outs?  yup, there’s two, which goes some way to explaining why the interior of the case appears to have been shot-gunned with rubber grommets.  The reason, if you haven’t already guessed, worked it out, or for that matter read the technical specification on the first page, is that the is DS6 is part of quite an elite club as it can house some of the largest motherboards on the market, including HPTX, E-ATX and XL-ATX.  You can of course still fit a standard size ATX, and rather bizarrely Nanoxia have also provided mounts for both Micro-ATX and Mini-ITX.  The spacing and distribution of the cable management holes is excellent, with special mention going to the row of holes across the roof edge.  The only real down side of the second smaller CPU cut out utilised with larger twin socket Mobos is that half of it will remain visible when a standard ATX board is used.

     

 

Moving to look at the interior in more detail we’ll start with the four 5.25bays.  Finished in white to match the rest of the interior the bays are fitted with black plastic tool free mechanisms on both sides.  The lower bay comes with a removable 5.25″ to 3.5″ adapter to enable the accommodation of smaller external drives and devices.  The roof of the bays is left open which is of particular interest to those wishing to put a large rad up there, but we’ll cover this in more detail later.

     

 

The DS6 will hold a total of thirteen 3.5″ or 2.5″ drives, with accommodation being split into banks of 10 and 3 respectively.  Unlike the smaller 3 drive rack, which can be removed and re positioned the main 10 drive rack is fixed in place by rivets.  Although we appreciate that water-cooling radiators can still be accommodated inside the case to the posterior of this rack, and that even with it in place at 400mm there’s still a prodigious amount of space for GPUs, we’d still like for it to have been modular, or at the very leas removable in its entirety, especially as we note that the rivets holding it in place are black indicating that the drive rack was powder coated separately then installed meaning it was only a small step and cost option for Nanoxia to use screws instead of rivets.  The radiator accommodation we mentioned is facilitated by the white bracket seen between the two drive racks.  Again we’ll cover this in more detail when we get to the build and cooling options, but suffice to say if you’re looking to put a rad in here you’re going to have to lose or reposition the 3 drive rack. 

     

 

Thankfully the 3 drive rack is easily removed, although access is from underneath by means of undoing 4 screws, so be prepared to brace that hernia when turning the case over.  Alternatively, if you wished, on removing the 3 drive rack you could put 2x120mm or 1x140mm fans down here.