Today we review the Winsis Wb-27.

First and foremost the Wb-27 is a budget oriented mid-tower case with a minimal exterior.   We got the case from Newegg.com for $45 +shipping.  The major selling point for this case to our client was: She wanted something very minimal looking with USB and audio ports on the top.  After looking through about 20 case styles this is the only case she was even remotely interested in.  She also requested a computer that was very quiet, but we’ll get into that late in the review.  So, we ordered it up and heres our thoughts on what we observed.

Lets start with packaging. This case came wrapped in a big plastic bag,  packed in the standard box full of Styrofoam cutouts keeping it firmly in place… to firmly?  I don’t want to get silly on this but the standard “exacto the top open, turn it upside down and let the case slide out”, didn’t here.  Looked like a glue accident, adhering the Styrofoam to the box.  Funny.

Above is our first image of the case freshly unpacked.   And we know you’re thinking it… yes we need a better camera.   We’ll be getting one and posting a review of it in the coming weeks.

Being that our camera has some obvious deficiencies it’s impossible to tell from this photo that the front panel is indeed plastic painted to look like brushed aluminum.  It would have been great if the door was a brushed aluminum or steel, but that would have added a few dollars to the price tag of the case.  I feel it would have been worth a few extra dollars as the paint used, while doing an excellent job of looking like metal, shows fingerprints that ended up being difficult to remove.   Furthermore the paint was a bit uneven looking less like metal near the top, almost as if the styrofoam & plastic bag had perhaps rubbed off a little of the paint.  Honestly, we needed to be pretty close to the case to tell, from a distance it looked like the paint was uniform.

The Winsis Wb-27 is a “screwless case”, in that the door has 2 screwless thumb screws and the drive bays have a screwless design of which we thought was a good design.  Later in the review ill talk about the screwless drive mounts.

The case has flimsy door has a latch that does little to ease the side removal.  In fact it makes the door removal more complicated than it should be.

For years I’ve seen a vast number of designs for the “easy” removal of a door.   Sadly, many are horrible.  This case took an new approach and they missed the mark by a long shot.  Getting this door on was not easy.   Every time we had them all hooked (its a hook system), one would pull up somewhere else as we pushed it closed.   The plastic latch on the door would then lock when one was not in place, forcing us to start over.

It was kind of a gag for us.  “hey do me a favor and put the cover on that”… hilarity ensues.

Opening the case up we can see that its a standard steel interior and comes with 1 120mm fan pre mounted below the power supply (not included).  The fan has dual connectors for both power supply or mainboard.  Also included is an utterly unusable screwless PCI slot system in this case.   The group of cables coming down from the top of the case are the USB, audio, and power connectors on the top of the case.  More about all of those later.   On the door there is a non adjustable exhaust port and a series of holes drilled like a grate for what appears to be additional ventilation.

First lets talk about the drilled grating.  We can not figure out how this is supposed to work.  From our initial observations we thought we could mount dual 80mm fans directly to the door.  However the hole pattern drilled is not compatible with any fans. Maybe if you had an 81.5mm fan you could use it.  We dont know of any such fans that exist in the wild.  So, we guess, it is merely a vent.  Our question is for what?  Any hot air that low in the case would rise.  Seems to us its more of a dust intake (not good).   We ended up gluing in a piece of mesh filter over the inside to cut down on any dust entering the case through these holes.

Secondly the Air duct:  It was not adjustable despite its appearance, and comes with a very fine mesh filter glued over the exhaust end.  The mesh and design of the vent hindered airflow.  Also a little perplexing is that a mesh this fine would do nothing more than trap dust inside and easily clog.  Once blocked it wouldn’t do anything other than keep hot air over the CPU.  Bad.   In a typical system, we could see this leading to thermal problems.  We ended up unscrewing it and throwing it away, then installing an 80mm exhaust fan.   A final thing perplexing about the exhaust fan mount is it only has 2 screw mounts pre-drilled.  The metal was stamped creating 4  raised mounts.  However, only 2 screw holes were pre-drilled.  Attempting to use just 2 screws to mount the 80mm fan created an irritating rattle as the fan wobbled against the cases sheet metal.  Luckily we had a drill bit that that made short work of the  sheet metal, and we drilled the 2 additional holes needed to silence the rattle.   Our opinion; you shouldn’t need a power drill to install a system fan.

Third, lets discuss the PCI screwless system.  In a nutshell, its a piece of plastic garbage we had remove and throw away.  The design of the screwless pci retention system cannot accommodate any kind of double slot card, which is moot due to the fact that you cannot install a pci card of single slot design when the motherboard is installed.   The design of the retention system has a tab used to lock cards into place. The tab is so tall that it wont move to the full open position as it hits the back side of the case.  This requires an angle to install any card, and the angle is so great you cant get a card of any moderate length in.   Luckily the 4 screws we had to remove to get it out of the case worked quite nicely in securing our cards to the chassis.

Now lets talk about the exterior usb / audio / firewire connectors and their interior cabling.  The top connectors & style is why our client chose this case.  We have to admit it is a physically attractive case and as you can see from the photo the case has 2 top mounted audio jacks: 1 stereo out and 1 microphone in.  Also located here is the power switch, 2 usb ports, and a firewire connection.

The Internal cabling was adequate and labeled with the appropriate + / -   to aid in connection to the power LED and switch.  The USB and audio were standard connectors and just barely long enough to reach the bottom of a full ATX board with video card installed.   By “just” we mean it was tight getting the audio cable over our video card to the audio connection on the mainboard. Snug, but in the end connected it was.  Later in the review you can see a picture of the  cables connected to our mainboard for a better illustration.

The door uses a magnetic latch to stay closed. The thought of random unshielded magnets on a case (or anywhere near a computer) makes me personally shudder, however our testing indicated no ill side effects.  Curiously, it did give the door a nice feel when opening and closing.   Be careful to not just swing the door closed as the magnet has some strength to it leading to a pretty good “slam” when its not intentional.   Really only a minor note, the door didn’t quite line up flush on our case but wasn’t really noticeable until the power was turned on.  Once the power was turned on you could see the door wasn’t quite in line with the cutout.

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Lets move on to the inside of the case now.  The Wb-27 has a standard layout with the power supply up top, mainboard below.   There is ZERO cable routing options in this case.  We were hoping we could route cables behind the drive cages, but alas they are solid and mounted flush to the back side of the case meaning you cannot remove the back door and route them behind the HDD cage.  Furthermore the cages have no holes big enough to route power or SATA cables through.   Exacerbating the situation is the cages are all riveted in.  Seems like a slight re-cut on the drive cages would remedy the problem as well as the very limited airflow problem this creates.  More on that in a minute.

The drive bays have a screwless system, and this is what we found to be the best part of this case.  Its actually one of the best systems we have seen for screwless mounting.  The mechanism consists of 2 thread less screws held by a spring, manipulated by a simple lever.  When installing a drive you simply slide it into place, it will loosely catch, flip the lever and the case locks tightly into place.  We want to point out that the upper bays have 4 screwless mounts.  But this case only has 3 upper bays.  The top bay is completely used by the top panel I/O that doesn’t use the mount.  We wonder why they bothered to put the mount there.  It cant be used on anything but the upper mounts, so why is it there?  Who knows.  One more odd note about this case.  The floppy drive bays (honestly, who still needs these bays?), have retention only for floppy drives.  This means if you want to mount your HDD in the floppy space… you cant.  Period.  Looking at the photo you can see clearly theres only holes drilled for floppies.  Weird.

Another oddity on this case is the number of Hard drives that can be installed screwlessly.  That number is 2.  It may not be a big deal for most, but we found it a bit strange to have  slots  for 5 drives, space for 3, and mounting for 2.  I’ll clear that up a little bit… There are screw holes drilled for 5 devices.  But the the top rivets protrude from the cage making it impossible to instal a standard HDD drive in that slot.  The lowest drive slot, has a similar problem.  It is impossible to get  a drive into the bottom slot due to the lip of the case.   That leaves 3 remaining slots, 2 of which have the screwless mechanism.    One thing to note: It is impossible to move or remove the screwless mechanism without breaking it.   Again, the HDD drive cage is riveted in.   This presents a problem with longer video cards in that the screwless mechanism protrudes a bit.  In our build, it was about 2mm from the edge of GTX260 we installed (see pic).   This means that newer cards, like the ATI 5800 series, will simply not fit inside this case.

Cooling:
The WB-27 has some additional issues here.  Above we talked about the air vent, and how we had to remove it, drill 2 holes so we could mount an exhaust fan over the CPU.  Without drilling additional holes through the sheet metal door, you can install a fan, but as described before it is going to rattle.  So for most, the choice you have is to A) use a poorly designed exhaust vent B) use no exhaust vent C) install a fan that rattles or D) drill.

The case came with a 120mm exhaust fan under the power supply.  The fan was not quiet, one our parameters was this box had to be quiet.  It required replacement and replace it we did.   Between the front of the case and the HDD cage there is a 120 / 90mm fan mount.  The issues here were 2 fold.  1st: Installing the fan was a pain.  We put in a 120mm silent fan as an intake.  Screwing the fan in required holding the fan in place while we screwed the closest screws to the door in.  That wasn’t difficult.  What was? The 2 screws near the other side.  There is no way to directly access the other side of the fan.  We discovered this when removing the other side of the case and finding a inconvenient piece of steel blocking any access to it.  So we got a stick and wedged it against the fan & case (as best we could) to hold the fan in place so we could thread the screws.   The 2nd issue is airflow.  There are adequate intake holes for air, although it could have been greatly improved by allowing the air to enter directly through the front of the case. Instead, air enters at the bottom under the front panel.   A side note: there is a slotted bit on the front of the case presumably to allow air intake, but its completely obscured by the door when the door is closed.  Additional testing indicated even with the door open, the air entered from the bottom of the case.  Finally the front fan blows onto the drive cage that has only mounting slots and screw holes to allow airflow.  Not the best by any measure.

Conclusion:
The Winsis Wb-27, despite how this review may appear, isn’t a terrible case.   It is an inexpensive and good looking case, but with some weird design flaws.  For around $50 it just doesn’t hold up to some of the competition, but it is unique in its minimal appearance.  Its flaws could easily have been caught & fixed prior to its release with some testing.  In our opinion, the bulk of the flaws in could be fixed for with little or no impact on the manufacturing price tag.  Problems such as the screwless pci mechanism, the door design, and exhaust vent are more than just an oversight, its a pure lack of testing.  The exhaust vent has a mesh that not only hinders airflow, but would easily clog. Furthermore only having 2 holes drilled despite having 4 mounts was just absurd.

Good:
+Minimal design
+Screwless drive mount design
+Cheap-ish

Bad:
-Airflow / Cooling
-Riveted drive cages & limited mounting options
-Screwless PCI design
-Zero cable management

Ultimately airflow, and specifically the exhaust vent, being detrimental to overall health of a computer system is why we are giving this case a: Not recommended.