Introduction

In-Win products have been featured at the site before, most recently a review of the elegant Allure. Today we have a manlier product for test.

In-Win made a male version of the Allure, it’s bigger, has better cooling and is designed to look like a B2 Stealth Bomber. In form it still remains an ATX case, but there are details added to make it at least have something in common with the gigantic airplane.

The box arrived it good condition after a trip from Taiwan to Europe.



It’s most unique feature is the automatic front door which covers the drive bays, we’ll take a closer look at how it functions later on.

Specifications

Straight from the In-Win product page these are the official specs:



The case is made from 0.8mm steel panels and in thus quite heavy for its compact size. Still you get to fit up to 4x5.25” devices which is far from bad.

Let’s take a closer look ->

Size comparison

While the B2 is a step up from Allure case, it’s still a rather compact tower case ; designed to fit ATX systems, or mATX with room to spare.

When comparing its size to that of the cases we tested in the past we’ll see that the B2 is indeed one of the smaller ones. On par with the Arctic Cooling T2 when we look at the case from the front.



To be able to fit larger high-end video cards, the case depth is important, so how does the B2 compare:




Look Outside

Outside of the box the B2 looks like this:



The left side panel is where the action is at, the other side is less interesting. In-Win has made an air in-take in the side panel in the form of the B2 bomber plane, the attention to detail is high, nice finishing:



Looking at the case from the front you could think that it’s a the cockpit of a plane;



At the back of the case you can spot the colorful out-take fan, 2 pre-made holes for water cooling.



Opening the hatch can be done either automatically by touching the button next to the power button. Or when your system doesn’t have power you can do it manually by first disengaging the little motor of the door mechanism.



The I/O panel situated behind a small door at the left side of the case is very complete, you get 2xUSB, Audio In/Out, Firewire and two eSATA connections!



At the bottom of the case are four feet with soft cushion to help reduce vibration noise.



Ok let’s pop the hatch ->

Look inside & Cooling

In-Win has taken time to reduce the need for tool when you want to install hardware inside the B2.

It starts with the side panels, which are snapped into place at the backside with 2 clips, they come of easily and snap back into place when needed to secure the side panels.



First thing you’ll notice is that the left side panel has an air-duct for CPU cooling attached. If you are using a larger tower cooler on your CPU however this plastic tube will be of no use; removal is easy as you just slide it out. You can see the dust filters In-Win installed here;




Inside the B2 you won’t find a lot of screws; you get a nice illustrated installation manual and a small set of mounting screws. The case internals reveal a second air duct which houses two 80mm fans.



Flipping this black plastic fan holder is a tool-less affair; you can now clearly see the two black/yellow fans:



The right fan holder can be swiveled 90° to be able to have the fan blow air towards the rear of the case.



It will be orientated like this:



At the back of the case you’ll find a 120mm fan; you can also see the tool-less clips to install PCI devices:



The front in-take fan sits right in front of the HDD cage; it can be easily removed:



The front fan has a fan filter to keep out dust.



Time to put some hardware inside ->

Installation

For the motherboard and power supply installation you will need a screwdriver, for all the other hardware you can take advantage of the tool-less featured offer by the B2 case.

Installation of HDD and Optical drives is made easy by use of a rail system; these spare rails are snapped into place on the drive. The rails are stored in their own 5.25” bay:




Raptor HDD with drive rail installed at one side

To be able to install devices in the external bays you need to remove the front panel, which is only held in place by a few plastic clips at each side.

Without the front panel you can see that the top 5.25” bay has been left open by default for your DVD drive of choice.



The HDD bay is more easily accessible and can be swiveled out slightly for easy access:



Despite our initial hope when we saw the depth stats of this case, it turns out that the B2 is a few millimeters short of able to fit a Geforce 8800 GTX and similar high end video cards.



Test Setup next ->

Test Setup and Test Methodology

Intel Test Setup
CPU	Intel Core 2 E6400 @ 2.8Ghz (from CSMSA)
Cooling	Coolermaster Hyper TX
Mainboard	Intel 975X Bad Axe (Modded by Piotke)
Memory	2 * 1Gb PC6400 OCZ
Other	Geforce 7900 GT + Zalman VF900 @ 5v Coolermaster Real Power M520 520W PSU 2x Western Digital 74Gb Raptor SATA HDD

Room temperature was 20°C during testing, ambient noise clocked in at 36dBA. Noise measurements were taken at 50cm from the front of the case.

Realtime HDR and Orthos were used to stress the Dual Core system; Core 2 Temp was used to monitor Core temperature (duh) and Speedfan to check the temperature of HDD and Motherboard. Rivatuner’s temp monitor checked the G80 GPU at regular intervals. Maximum values were recorded.

The Intel Bax Axe motherboard features several thermal sensors, the “mobo” values are those recorded by the sensor which can be found between the DDR2 memory banks, marked A in the overview:



Cable Routing & Automatic Door

Without special features to hide or help your route cables the B2 case does an average job at keeping the cables outside the ideal airflow path. Nevertheless if you don’t fill up all the drive bays you should be able to hide those extra cables there.



With the bottom plastic panel closed it does look less messy:



When powered on the button next to the power buttons becomes sensitive to the touch, triggering the automatic door. A blue LED sits at the top of the case drive bays and lights everything below. When the front door is closed you can only see a small blue light escaping.



There’s no better to illustrate how it works/sounds, then with a small movie. In the clip below you’ll see how the door functions; and how to override the automatic system by disengaging the small motor with the switch at the left side.



Onto the stress tests ->

Performance Results

Since we couldn’t use our Geforce 8800 GTX card inside the case, we compared the result of the B2 to those cases we also tested with the Geforce 7900 GT mid-range video card.

Our first test was with all the case fans, front 120mm, rear 120mm and two 80mm at the side hooked up at full speed. Second test we disconnected the fans at the side.

Here are the results under full system load:



The good: all components inside this case are kept cool, well below critical levels.
The bad: noisy! The 2x80mm fans are not too good at running silent, and they have only a minor impact on cooling. Unplugging those brings the noise level on par with the other contestants.

Conclusive Thoughts

The In-Win B2 Stealth Bomber case got picked up on our noise radar despite it smaller size. It’s not a large tower case and fails to fit larger video cards. If you have a mid-range setup you’ll have no issues though.

For those looking for a theme PC case, it doesn’t get much better, for an out of the box product. The automatic front door does give make it more than “just looks”. The well placed blue LED light helps you read the CD/DVD label in the dark.



Priced at $125 it’s an affordable case with a unique design and execution. The internal layout is well thought out with easy access to all the areas, dust filter for in-take fans and many tool-less features.

In a busy market place companies try their best to set their product apart, with the B2 In-Win succeeds in that area, a small adaptation of the side panel cooling fans (make ‘m 120mm!) and design to fit larger video cards would make it stand out even more. With its current features, if you have a mid-range system and dig the looks, the B2 is surely worth considering.



We thank Cherry from In-Win for allowing us to take the B2 Stealth Bomber for a spin, until next time!