Building With The Raidmax Agusta
Raidmax turns the layout of traditional full-towers upside-down in its Agusta, its modernized motherboard-on-top design putting drive cages at the bottom. Like most cases with a power supply below the motherboard, the Agusta has a hole at the top of the motherboard tray that looks like it'd be suitable for an ATX12V lead.
You might also expect a 23.8” case with a top panel over 2” thick to support liquid cooling, but the Agusta’s design doesn’t make that possible. There’s barely enough room in the top panel to hold its two stock fans, and those can only be installed and removed after first pulling out the motherboard.
Our Agusta sample arrived without a manual, but the rest of its installation kit includes three cable holders, several fiber washers, several cable ties, and mounting screws. Standoffs were factory-installed on the motherboard tray, with one missing.
Raidmax ditches the outdated AC'97 audio connector in favor of cleaner HDA-only wiring. A flat ribbon holds power, reset, and activity leads to further clean-up the cable cluster.
The Agusta’s drive trays place 3.5” drive mounting holes on the side and 2.5” holes on the bottom. Five-and-a-quarter-inch bays above those use quarter-turn release latches.
We stated that a hole at the top of the Agusta’s motherboard tray appears to support ATX12V leads, but that hole gets covered up by any motherboard. Raidmax can’t fix this without a complete redesign, since there’s no room above the board to move it. We were instead forced to wrap our cable over the motherboard’s surface.
The finished build looks like it should be an excellent performer.
