Verdict: Five 80mm fans? They must be joking!

If the Aspire X-Navigator were a bicycle then it would be a BMX, as the frosted-glass, headlight-shaped blue lights attest to. This means it's likely to appeal either to people in their mid-20s wishing to revisit their childhood, or teenagers who have just begun to discover the joys of backflips and wheelies.

The cooling system comprises a battery of old-school 80mm fans. There's one at the front, two at the rear and one at the top, and you can add a fifth 80mm fan at the front too. There's also a 120mm fan on the windowed left side panel, which is positioned to blow cool air over the CPU and graphics card. A single rheostat on the front panel can adjust the speed of all of the fans. Also included as standard is an Aspire-branded PSU. It claims to have a maximum output of 500W and a large 12V rail capable of producing 34A, and is cooled by a pair of temperature-controlled 80mm fans.

As the X-Navigator is so tall (just over 500mm), there's lots of room inside for drives - 13 to be precise. Four of these are 5.25in bays, and there are two external 3.5in bays and seven internal 3.5in bays. All of the latter are clustered together in three removable caddies, which makes installing drives very easy. Despite its height, the X-Navigator is not very deep, so there's no room inside for an E-ATX motherboard. Not that we'd want to cool a dual-processor system with 80mm fans anyway.

If you're not into the black and silver colour scheme then you can remove the silver plates from the front panel and replace them with dark blue or metallic blue plates. But, whichever colour scheme you choose, the X-Navigator still looks like a child's bicycle from the 1980s.

The real problem with the X-Navigator is that because it's bundled with a PSU (of unknown quality), it's a lot more expensive than similar-size cases. We're also not convinced that four 80mm fans (or five, if you add another at the front) is the most efficient way to keep a high-end PC cool.

• Cases - 21st November 2008
• Motherboards - 24th October 2008
• Gaming Headsets - 26th September 2008
• Dream PCs - 24th September 2008
• Headphones - 12th September 2008
• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
• PSUs - 14th July 2008

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