From what I have discussed so far, the X500 would be your standard, run-of-the-mill case. But, the three biggest selling points of the rig are on the front and don’t have much to do with the innards. The largest feature is the power drive bay door. While many cases have a drive door, they mostly sit on hinges and you open it like a regular door. On the X500, the door is mounted onto a railing system and opened via an electric motor and triggered by a button in the upper right. Its pretty cool and liable to get you some attention from a few geeks.
The most notable feature of the case is the blue backlit LCD. Most cases just have a couple of lights – one for power and one for hard drive activity. The X500 tells you much more than that. The HDD activity light is integrated into the reset switch, so the actual button lights up when the hard drive is active. HDD activity and power status are both indicated with digital icons on the LCD. But, the display also serves as a digital clock or a thermometer. On the default setting, it will simply tell you the time. On the temperature setting, it will tell you the temperature of the inside of your case in Centigrade or Fahrenheit. It gets its information from a small thermal probe on a wire lead, so you can mount the probe anywhere you wish on the inside of the case and get the reading from the LCD display.
Both the drive bay door and LCD are operated directly off of the main 20-wire ATX power lead used to power your motherboard. The case comes with a connector used to tap into that power lead. The drive bay door will only operate when the PC is powered on. Since the main power switch is located in an area which would be covered by the door if you powered down with the door down, there is an alternative power switch located next to the front-mounted I/O connectors. The LCD remains backlit when the power is off, but when powered on, there is a outer ring around the LCD which lights up indiglo, providing a cool effect.
The bottom end of the bezel contains a small flip-down panel with the front I/O connectors behind. In this location, there are 2 USB ports, a microphone jack, an earphone jack, one Firewire port and a second power switch (as mentioned above). The leads from each of these ports extend back into the interior to be connected to your motherboard leads. This is a very convenient feature. You can plug hardware such as digital cameras and other USB/Firewire equipment into your PC without reaching back behind the system. And the earphone jack is convenient for those into the music.
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