The Chassis

The Noah comes well packed inside a simple, thick cardboard box. The size of the box instantly betrays the size of the case, as it is barely as large as a package of a normal ATX power supply unit. Nonetheless, the case was very well placed and protected inside it, despite its very low weight and small size.

With the Noah you will receive a good number of bundled items. There is a plastic stand which allows the case to be mounted horizontally, which can be a good item for certain places. There is a PCI riser card, which allows a single PCI card to be mounted inside the case, and a converter which converts your typical notebook optical drive to IDE.

The case unfortunately has the AC to DC converter on the outside, as a means of saving space. The power converter is a 120-240V to 12V unit with a maximum delivery capability of 80W. That is more than enough power for any ITX system. Both a UK and an EU plug are included inside the package. But you will find many more cables in the package. Besides two typical IDE cables, there is an IDE to 2.5” HDD converter, allowing the install of a laptop HDD inside the case. Furthermore there are two power cables, one for the ATX connector of the motherboard and one for two devices. Clearly the Molex connector is meant for the HDD and the floppy connector is for the optical drive.

You will also find many accessories inside the package such as screws, cable ties and a very basic installation manual. There are also 4 rubber pads which you can stick at any side of the case, effectively serving as anti slip feet.

The case itself is small, measuring only 97mm(H) x 273mm(D) x 202mm(W), barely the size of 2 ATX optical drives. It is made from 1mm thick steel, painted black, and has a silver aluminum front bezel. The design is attractive, for such a small computer. Only the aluminum power button is visible, with a blue LED ring encircling it and the discreet red IDE LED placed slightly lower. Nearly half of the front bezel is a door. Opening it will unveil the reset button and the front connection ports. There are two USB ports, a firewire port, a headphone port and a microphone port.

Both sides of the case are perforated to allow proper airflow for the system. Even if the system can work without fans, passive airflow is almost always necessary for electronics. The rear of the case is dominated by the I/O panel and the PCI slot, with nothing important to observe besides the 3 thumbscrews.

The interior of the case has very little room, the drives are held on a ‘bridge’ above the ITX board. You can only mount a single notebook optical drive and a HDD. However you can mount either a normal 3.5” or a notebook 2.5” hard disk drive inside the Noah, making this case far more versatile. There is a silent Evercool 80mm fan placed at the side of the case, which will be removed for this review as it is not needed for our specific system.

For such a small case, there are a lot of cables. Fortunately you can remove the cables from the front ports which you do not use completely. The DC-DC power supply PCB is placed right next to the front ports PCB, it is very small and requires no form of cooling, mostly because the AC-DC converter is external.

After installing everything inside the case including a normal SATA 3.5” drive, you can see that there is not much room left; actually, we were left with just a little room between the heatsink and the drive to place the cables. Installing a PCI card would make things even more cramped.