Akasa’s New Venom Strike Chassis

Chassis came well supplied and securely packaged which is always a good sign that the company take care whence shipping products of this magnitude.  On opening up the packaging box the first part to greet our eyes was the Silver badge of the Strike which is quite striking giving it a good look.  Once out of the box we saw what all the excitement was about.  Slick cool, and yes some might not like the colour to their taste but we thought it looked the part.  Many companies tend to stick with traditional black and silver – but this is something you will either love or hate.  

The side access panel to the system is meshed and opens up very easily with the thumb screws – no need for any screwdriver.  The choice of offerings in how you are going to cool your system from the side (oh yeah who have multiply GPU set-up’s) is very good indeed. It does mean the option of maintaining optimal system cooling integrity whilst operating at the highest levels.

Moving to the secondary panel the embossed Venom Viper certainly caught our eye.  Once more swiftly the panel is removed by the two thumb screws giving you access to the back plane of the system and there is a huge section cut away for those who like to change out heatsinks.  Though this shouldn’t be a problem now as it’s just a case of drop in and screw down the preferred cooler of choice.

Internally we see tons of storage space with neat additional points of the cable run points all have rubber mounts allowing a neat packing away and maintaining optimal airflow throughout the system.  One serious point of note is that on the other side of the chassis is approximately 1 inch of clearance this will be apple room for those who like to hide all their cabling away.  The huge 23cm fans are clearly in view at the front and top of the chassis, top one is as described easily removed to allow the serious water cooling kit to be mounted.  Rubber dampeners are in place to mount the PSU again allowing free flow of air and absorbing the noise from the PSU that some readily give out.  The additional cooling points at the read and bottom you more choice for additional cooling but within our tests we found no requirement at all to fit a cooling fan to the bottom of the chassis.

The quick release mounts for the fitting of the graphics cards is very good, very tight indeed and you hear a resounding click when the retention arm is firmly in place properly.  We did try to manually pull out the graphics card but the retention pin and arm made it very hard indeed to achieve this.

The 5 ˝” bays retention clips opened up easily enough though once the DVDROM was in place they clamped home hard and fast.

Finally from the top we see all the additional plugs and sockets today’s busy end-user requires. An eSATA port, 3 USB 2 ports and 1 USB 3 port.  Not forgetting the traditional Mic and headphones sockets.  The fan controllers are optional for use and aimed squarely at the overclocking market allowing them complete control of 5 fan headers which is a substantial amount.   Last but not least a little neat tray to put your USB sticks in place safely.