Now to step back and look at the overall design itself. As mentioned above, and seen in the pictures, the case we received is the model with the blue 6mm aluminum face strip around the front, top and back surfaces of the case. Unlike most flashy paint jobs, this blue aluminum actually continues down part of the rear of the case as well. The only parts not coloured blue are at the I/O plate and all the slots, for obvious reasons. If you don't dig blue, it comes in black, silver and red as well, all very reminiscent of sports car colours. As far as quality goes, Spire has done a nearly flawless job. The exterior finish and build quality is almost perfect. The paint job is beautiful, and the design and appearance of this case is extremely simple, elegant, stylish, and unique. I find this case very appealing to look at. This continues onto the inside where the metal edges are all properly tapered and the fit is very precise. The only sharp edge I managed to find is the corners of the top aluminum plate, where it curves around to meet the back plate. These corners are fairly protected, but if you go looking for them they are there. You may just find the sharp corner if your carrying the case and it slides downwards against you.

Both sides of the case have large sized pull-handles at the top. When pulled. each side side of the case can either butterfly down and lay flat on your table, or be lifted off completely. I particularly liked the half of the rear panel that holds the I/O slot covers also opens with the right side. That way you can easily install an entire motherboard and all of your I/O cards outside the confines of the case. Then when you close the right side panel everything goes into the case together. You can see the pictures below to better understand this design but it is absolutely brilliant. Back to the left side panel we see a large 120mm grill which has an internal duct to supply fresh air directly to the CPU. You can also opt to remove the duct and attach a 120mm fan as well for more effective cooling.

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Inside the case you'll see a horizontal metal brace across the left side when the panel is removed. This holds an optional 80mm fan in a tool-less mount, like almost all the case's fan mounts are. With this brace open there are three pull-out plastic supports on the left to help support longer cards installed in your motherboard's slots. This case comes with 3 fans: an 80mm fan in the rear of the case, a 120mm in the front and on the far side of the 3.5" drive bays another 80mm can be found. When I went to check out the 80mm fan beside the drive bays I was pleasantly surprised to find the right side 80mm fan mounted in a tool-less holder that actually opened like a door with one side hinged to the case so the fan could be removed easily. It's impressive to see such small attention to detail, even on something like a fan mount which isn't even visible most the time! All internal drive bays are tool-free making installation and swapping drives extremely fast and easy. The rear slots are not tool-free and require the installation of screws to hold your cards. I prefer cases that are this way because some tool free slot cases I've reviewed in the past have had some incompatibilities with certain video cards and they can "pop" loose or not even close at all. I prefer my cards to be held by screws thank you, as this case provides.

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Installation:
The first item I usually install in a case is the power supply. It would be a shame to loose grip of it and have it crash down onto the main board if you had mounted that first -- ouch. With this case I opened both side covers down onto the table and then pulled off the rear decorative blue cover which is held in place by circular metal spring clips - no tools required. I then installed my power supply and screwed it in place. Replacing the rear cover then hid the mounting screws of the power supply - nice touch.

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I then removed the front cover which is also held in place with circular metal spring clips and tipped it to the side a bit because of the wires from the hidden USB, Firewire, and Audio connectors that were still attached. This allowed me to remove the chassis covers and open 2 of the 5.25 bays for my optical devices. I noticed that the optical devices fit into the drive bays very snuggly. I liked this close attention to tolerance having worked on cheap cases where things fit extremely sloppy. These bays offer tool-less mounting with a plastic clip that inserts into the 2 screw holes of the optical drive and locks it in place. The same design is used for a floppy drive if you mount one of those in the 3.5" bay below. With the front removed you can also gain access to the 120mm fan which provides airflow into the case, and cooling to the lower 3.5" removable drive bay at the bottom of the case. After your optical or floppy devices are mounted you can simply push the front plate of the case back onto the chassis.