The ugly duckling of cases
Nick Race02 March 2008, 11:43 PM
This is the first Tagan chassis to come through the doors of the APC Labs, and frankly, we wouldn’t care if it’s the last.
The APLUS El Diablo is a monstrously sized mid-tower ATX case with what Tagan claims to be the world’s largest case fan. The side panel is mostly taken up with a 360mm fan. Yep, 36cm. It’s bigger than the exhaust fan in our laundries.
Once we got over that hump, the El Diablo is a seriously ugly case. The vaguely grey highlight down the middle of the front door doesn’t do anything for its looks. The door itself seems fragile, and we’d be scared of breaking it. In fact, a small amount of downward pressure made the front of the case pop off. That’s not what we like to see.
We were unimpressed with the cable management of the unit, needing to stretch a few power cables around the very large case to get all the fans powered. The case can hold an impressive seven 3.5in HDDs, plus five 5.25in drives. Larger EATX motherboards are supported as well. We don’t feel the quality of this case is even close to what we’re used to seeing from Tagan.