Inside the GRone
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The GRone's interior is big and roomy, and you get the feeling you're getting a lot of chassis for your money. The motherboard mounting holes suggest that Extended ATX boards will slot in with room to spare, but In Win's desire to support the most extreme components comes to the detriment of mainstream users. The cable-routing holes, for example, are positioned with E-ATX boards in mind, and if you're using anything smaller, the holes feel a bit too far out.
Cable management is geared for E-ATX, but other than that, there aren't many criticisms in here. The GRone's cavernous interior is well-laid out, and building into it is simple and straightforward. The tool-free optical drive bays use lime-green push-pins that hold the drive in place, and though the picture appears to show four bays, only three are usable as the topmost bay leads to the front I/O panel.
The hard-disk bays, meanwhile, are split across two cages; the upper cage holds five drive and the lower cage holds three. Each bay supports your choice of 2.5/3.5in drive, with tool-free clips applied for the latter, and both cages can be completely removed. What's useful is that the cages are mounted in a separate steel column, so removing them doesn't mean you have to sacrifice the 140mm internal fan.
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Speaking of fans, In Win has five of them installed by default; two 140mm front intakes, a 140mm fan attached to the hard-disk column, a 140mm rear exhaust and a 140mm top exhaust. Again, the plastic clips that hold the front fans in place don't fill us with confidence, but there's a lot of air-cooled potential here, and the pre-installed fans are easily daisy-chained to an integrated fan controller which offers two modes; Silence and Turbo.
Those wanting to expand on the default will find room for a further two top exhaust fans, two bottom intakes and a side fan mounted behind the large cutout in the motherboard tray. You're never going to be short on air, and you'll be well served if you go the liquid route, too. The three top mounts provide room for a 360mm radiator, and if you remove the lower hard-disk cage you can install a 240mm radiator at the bottom of the chassis.
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The GRone certainly isn't lacking in room or expandability - it makes our high-end, dual-GPU Intel Ivy Bridge platform look tiny - but cable management should have been better. As stated earlier, the pre-drilled routing holes are geared toward E-ATX boards, one is partially covered by the internal fan, and there aren't many places to tie cables down behind the motherboard tray.
We'd liked to have seen In Win include another couple of cable-routing holes alongside the standard ATX standoffs, but on the plus side, five of the existing cutouts are rubber-grommeted and well-sized. There's just enough room behind the motherboard tray for excess cables (though there probably should have been more considering the overall size of the case), the up-and-over rubber-grommeted hole makes it easy to attach the CPU power cable, and the thumb-screwed expansion slots are easy to work with. There are ultimately very few complications, and the GRone makes it easy to put together a high-end build in next to no time.
