Closer Look: Interior

The Elite 120 Advanced (right in this photo) had a single 5.25″ bay and a three-slot drive cage that could hold any combination of 2.5″ drives or 3.5″ drives mounted directly under it. The Elite 130 does away with the drive cage in favor of “mounting points” scattered about the interior.

There are four places to mount 2.5″/3.5″ devices. Three of them involve the use of special screws and rubber grommets that press into place to secure the drive. There’s room for two 2.5″ devices in the 5.25″ tray if you’re not using something else there, and you can mount a 2.5″ or 3.5″ drive at the bottom of the case and on the removable vertical perforated panel in the right side of the case. There’s also a “slide-in” mount for a single 2.5″ device on the bottom side of the 5.25″ bay. All of these mounting points mean you don’t need a drive cage, and the lack of a drive cage frees up space for a single 120mm radiator and fan at the front of the case.

The vertical perforated “drive mount” panel can be removed, as can the small 80mm fan to its right. The fan is useful for blowing cool are over your motherboard’s voltage regulators, but I found it to have an annoying high-pitched sound, so I removed it.

That’s pretty much all there is to the interior. The removal of the drive cage makes the Elite 130 an open box for your system.

So, can we really fit a water cooler and three drives in there? Let’s find out…