Introduction

We expected Chenbro to send us a sample of a case that lived up to the rest of their product line. We also expected Chenbro to introduce to us a mid-tower PC chassis that would include the features which we had seen in Chenbro's other cases such as the Xpider II. Instead, Chenbro sent us a product that exceeded our expectations and took our breath away!

From the various pictures and feature lists that we have come across, we grew even more anxious to get our hands on the Gaming Bomb II. Taking a look back, the Gaming Bomb I was based on a design pre-dating the Xpider II. The Xpider II had the same general internal layout as the GB, but added a larger HDD mount to hold two more 3-1/2" drives for a total of four HDDs. The only other aspect that changed was the external look; the left side panel and front bezels were both custom-designed for the theme of the Xpider II.

With the introduction of the new Gaming Bomb II, we expected Chenbro to continue using steel for the body and plastic for the bezel as it had for many of its other cases. Instead, we received a case that had the looks of something for which only an enthusiast would feel comfortable spending. Here is a quick peek at the Gaming Bomb II.

Chenbro Gaming Bomb II
	The Good
	+ Lightweight aluminum design + Front Panel USB, Audio, FireWire + Tool-less features throughout + Integrated Cable Management (ICMTM) system + FlexiBayTM removable/pivoting HDD cage + Removable motherboard tray
	The Bad
	- Price - No tool-less HDD bays

So, what exactly makes the Gaming Bomb II so amazing besides the obvious change in looks as well as construction? As soon as we signed for the box delivered by UPS, we ripped the case out of its packaging and jumped right in! Take a look at why we are so excited about this Chenbro creation.

More information is available on the Gaming Bomb II at Chenbro's website.

External Design

Usually, we begin our look at the external design of the case at the front bezel, since that is usually what we notice first. With the GB2, however, we noticed two handles at the top of the case before anything else. The handles are placed at the front and back of the chassis and are reminiscent of those on Apple's G5 cases.

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While we're at the top of the chassis, we noticed a square shaped vent for a 92mm fan that can be mounted to exhaust air. We will talk more about that in the Cooling section.

Moving back to the front of the GB2, we see a well-designed bezel with clean, straight and rounded edges. At the top, we see on the right are the HDD activity LED, the reset button, and the large square-shaped power button, which has the Power LED integrated into it. The large size of the power button makes it easy to press while the reset button's small size keeps unwanted reboots from happening. The reset button is a bit too small, though, for even an averaged sized finger to press.

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Next, we see four 5-1/4" drive bay covers and two 3-1/2" drive bay covers. Each can be easily taken off by removing two screws for each cover.

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At the bottom of the chassis, we notice the auxiliary ports, which include a FireWire port, two USB ports, and the standard audio input/output ports. Each is labeled clearly with the standardized icons.

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Pulling on the front bezel from the left side, we were able to open the bezel door. By doing this, we can now remove the drive bay covers by undoing the screws on each side. From the picture, we see a clear plastic molding that holds the HDD LED, reset and power buttons in place along with the aluminum grill and auxiliary ports at the bottom of the bezel.

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External Design (cont'd)

The right side panel is bare and has no special features. The left side panel, on the other hand, features a simple rectangular window with rounded corners. This is a shift from the Gaming Bomb I's artistically shaped window, and Chenbro is probably aiming this product towards a more mature market.

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The side panels are secured to the GB2 by way of thumbscrews, which make them much easier to remove by pulling the panels back about an inch, then up.

A view of the backside of the chassis reveals a number of features. First, there is a removable power supply back plate, which can be removed to allow installation of the power supply from the back, or can be replaced with a plate for various power supply standards.

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There are also 4 more thumbscrews, which secure the removable motherboard tray to the chassis. We will look into this more later. For now, let's crack this puppy open and check out the inside.

Internal Design

Inside, the Gaming Bomb II Chenbro has served up a full plate of features. Chenbro has employed a wide variety of tool-less features, most of which are new to us. These include drive locking systems, which are the first of their kind that we have seen.

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To secure 5-1/4" drives, we first turned the knobs 180o counter-clockwise, inserted the drives in the bays and turned the knobs back 180o clockwise to lock them in place.

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The 3-1/2" external drive bay mounts were designed slightly different. We first have to open the locks by pulling the lever out from left to right, and then back to the left to snap it back in place once the drives are inserted.

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Another drive bay feature that we noticed was Chenbro's FlexiBayTM technology. The Xpider II employed a removable drive cage, which positioned HDDs with power and data connections facing the back of the case. The GB2 has updated this cage to allow users to reposition the cage so that the drive bays can be mounted to have their power/data cable connections face to the left or right side of the chassis as well as back towards the motherboard. A potential downside to the cage is the lack of the tool-less design that the upper drive bays have. The HDD cage uses screws, which are conveniently supplied down the side of the cage, to mount HDDs.

Internal Design (cont'd)

The expansion slots are also tool-less, using thumbscrews to secure add-on cards in place. Thumbscrews are the simplest, yet the most effective method in securing add-on cards. Each expansion slot cover is lined with holes to allow air to flow past installed cards and passively cool them.

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The power supply sits on a platform to help ease the stress on the structure of the back of the chassis. Our PowerStream unit is pretty heavy compared to smaller footprint units.

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Another feature that Chenbro has implemented in the GB2 is the Integrated Cable Management system, or ICM for short. Composed of about 3/4" of space behind the motherboard tray and two rectangular holes on the tray, the ICM creates hidden areas to stow away the mess of wiring from the power supply. Though not as advanced as the name sounds, the feature does help with systems that have many components to power, and keeps loose wiring from getting caught in the various fans.

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Cooling

We look at the hardware available today and see a wide range of equipment, from low-end CPUs to the highest end of VGA cards. There is a tight positive correlation between the performance levels of the equipment against the heat that it gives off. Each system needs enough cooling equipment, no matter how it is configured, to keep its components running at the safest levels as possible.

Chenbro has included two 120mm fans in the GB2. The first fan is mounted at the front as an intake. It sits directly in front of the HDD cage, which also helps cool any installed drives.

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The second 120mm fan is mounted at the back of the case as an exhaust and aids in the front to back circulation of airflow.

A third 92mm fan can be mounted at the top of the chassis to improve cooling in the GB2.

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We will test the effectiveness of these fans as well as their sound levels later in our benchmarks.

Construction

The Gaming Bomb II, besides the tool-less drive bay securing mechanisms, is made completely of brushed aluminum. This, of course, makes for an extremely lightweight construction as well as a sleek look overall.Using aluminum also makes it easy to create any shape that comes to mind. Chenbro has shown this by manufacturing the aluminum bezel door with rounded side edges to give it a softer, easy-on-the-eyes look.

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We did not see any security features like key locks or side loops permanently installed on the GB2. Since this is a high end case, many will use it with high end components. And though many users do not use the security features that manufacturers implement, they are nice features to have for those users who would like to use them. Chenbro does mention that the GB2 has the ability to accompany "Common Locking Technology".

Motherboard Tray

It has been a while since we have seen a chassis with a removable motherboard tray. The last chassis that had a similar removable tray was Lian Li's PC-6070. The fully removable tray proved to be a positive aspect for users who frequently update their motherboards. However, we have come to realize that even those who replace their hardware often will not necessarily need to remove the motherboard tray to do this.

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The Gaming Bomb II is roomy as it is. In fact, to remove the motherboard tray would take more effort than to keep it in place, since all of the wiring to the power supply and the drives would need to be disconnected. We feel that a removable motherboard tray is not as important as a complete tool-less design.

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Another aspect of the motherboard tray that we were concerned about was the method by which the stand-offs were implemented. Chenbro has mounted two different types of stand-offs: the standard 1/3" long stand-offs as well as shorter 1/8" stand-offs, which would need to be extended using the supplied stand-off extenders to install any motherboard. Chenbro should either do away with the dual stand-off type system and stick to one type, or go back to the standard, do-it-yourself method of supplying separate stand-offs for the user to install.

Installation

With all of the tool-less features in the GB2, it took no time at all to install our test bed. Once we finished, which was in about 10 minutes, we had plenty of time to play with the cable management system to see how we could route the power supply wiring efficiently to the necessary parts of the chassis.

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This was also not a difficult task, since Chenbro has included plastic clips to hold wiring in place. We did need to put in some extra effort to put the right side panel back on, since there was a lot of wiring from our PowerStream. When finished, though, everything looked clean as it should.

Benchmarking - Thermal

Today, we begin applying our new thermal benchmarking methodology to mid-tower cases. In the past, we have measured the temperatures of only the key components of our test bed, which provided only a little insight on how well the cooling systems in each case worked. Our new process not only shows the temperatures of the components installed, but also the temperature of the ambient air around each component.

PC Mid-Tower Test Bed
Chaintech VNF3-250 AMD Athlon 64 3200+ OCZ PC3200 DDR x 2 Zalman CNPS7000 Copper Seagate Barracuda 120GB SATA ATI 9800XT OCZ 520W PowerStream	Click to enlarge.

The thermal readings for the key components and points on the motherboard during operation were as follows. The numbers in each square represent the temperature of that particular section of the case in degrees celsius:

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The warmest regions in the GB2 are around the CPU, PSU, and chipset areas. From the lower temperatures at the front of the case it is safe to assume that all of the warm air is being pulled towards the back of the case and out through the PSU as well as the rear 120mm exhaust fan.

Here are the temperatures of the various key components in the system. Temperatures have been taken directly off of the surface of the hardware this time for an accurate reading of actual component temperatures.

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We measured the temperature of the CPU's heatsink at 35 while the core runs as hot as 51 degrees under a few minutes of constant 100% CPU load. The VGA card's heatsink ran extremely hot as we have observed in past instances at about 52 degrees while the GPU's core ran at 67 degrees while running a graphically intense application. The front intake fan kept our 120GB Barracuda at 36 degrees throughout our benchmarks which kept us happy.

Benchmarking - Sound

The other performance meter when it comes to cases is noise levels. We measure the noise level of the Gaming Bomb II at a distance of 12" away from the closed chassis with the power supply and heat sink fans turned off. Take a look at our results.


While thermal performance was above par, it came at a huge cost with sound. The GB2 produced just as much sound with its dual 120mm fans as the Aspire X-Navigator with its four 80mm and one 120mm fans. While connected to the motherboard, both fans ran at a constant ~3200rpm, no matter the temperature of the system.

Final Words

We have seen many case designers try to put out their rendition of the perfect case, but only some rarely come close. With so many features that a case could have, we need to look at the costs of having everything. It just isn't possible to include tool-less designs throughout the case while it is constructed of an all-aluminum body, with a removable motherboard tray and pivoting drive cages. The costs, both manufacturing as well as selling, would be tremendous.

Chenbro has weighed the features and has picked out the ones that they feel should be in a chassis no matter what. They have implemented tool-less locking mechanisms into their drive bays. They have included rubber mounts for their FlexiBay HDD cage, which can be removed and also positioned in two arrangements.

Chenbro has also implemented a removable motherboard tray as well as a system of passages to maintain a clean, managed environment inside the case, which reduces cable clutter to the bare minimum. Features like this may be small, but help bring a chassis closer to the state of perfection.

The GB2 performed extremely well in our thermal benchmarks. Though very loud, the dual 120mm fans helped keep the air flowing to move warm air out of the chassis as quick as possible. The Athlon 64 3200+ remained between 37-48 degrees from idleness to 100% load,which is a very safe range. The "holed" design of the expansion slot covers also helped cool the VGA card a few degrees by allowing air to flow past the 9800XT back through the holes.

So, the question on everyone's mind is, "is the Gaming Bomb II worth the money?" In our honest opinion, the GB2 is one of the best cases that we have seen in Chenbro's product line. They went from plastic and steel-themed gaming chassis to high end, enthusiast class gaming cases with many functional improvements.

The Gaming Bomb II should be arriving at retailers sometime this month and for about $240, you can pick one up just in time for the holidays. The price may seem a bit steep to the novice user, but for those who are looking for features and functionality combined with good looks and don't mind spending 2½ bills, the Gaming Bomb II is definitely for you and we would recommend it to those who can afford it.