Cubitek HPTX ICE Review: How Far Aluminum Can Go

Assembling the Cubitek HPTX ICE

Where Cubitek's design does substantially differ from Lian Li is in ease of use. Lian Li's engineers have a tendency to experiment pretty heavily with their internal designs, often at the expense of practicality. The HPTX ICE, on the other hand, is a very straightforward design with very little for the end user to figure out.

I was disappointed to see Cubitek hadn't pre-installed the motherboard mounts, but all of the different types of screws and accessories came in their own neatly labeled plastic baggies so the mounts themselves were easy enough to install. Getting the board in was basically a breeze as it often is in larger enclosures (though a large HPTX board might be more difficult). The same was true of our power supply, which sits neatly on the bottom mount and screwed in against light padding.

Everything else was easier than in a competing Lian Li (or even SilverStone) enclosure, but more fraught than I'd have liked. The Cubitek HPTX ICE's 3.5" drive mounting system was fairly easy to figure out once I consulted the manual: they use a similar mechanism to the one Lian Li employs, with rubber grommets being screwed into the sides of the drive and then the drive itself being slid into the rails. Then a metal stopping bar (secured with thumbscrews) locks the drives in place. I can see why it was employed and while I still feel like it adds a little bit of extra work, I'm not overly bothered by it.

The 3.5"-to-double-2.5" adaptor tray was slightly more perplexing. Lining up the screws to mount the drive into the tray was actually surprisingly difficult, and most users are going to want to install a 2.5" drive into the bottom of the tray first instead of the top mount.

Unfortunately, things only get worse with the 5.25" drive bays. The bay shields themselves are surprisingly cheap and seem to be secured largely with the power of prayer, making them extremely easy to pop into the enclosure due to the malleable nature of the aluminum used for them. SilverStone dodged this bullet in the FT02 by actually screwing in the bay shields; it adds an extra step, but also makes the shields much harder to accidentally shove into the case. Instead of having predefined notches for the 5.25" drive thumbscrews, there are also essentially open mounts; the upshot is that this allows you to at least try to align the 5.25" drive fairly carefully, but the downside is that it's also more difficult to get it mounted straight at all.

The worst of the assembly was honestly the video card, though. Double-slot video cards can be surprisingly difficult to line up correctly, depending on just how off (or even slightly off) you are when mounting the motherboard, but the HPTX ICE was unusually brutal. Expansion bay covers are mounted using thumbscrews (that's the easy part), but I found the case was actually bowing out slightly in the back. In order to get the card's mounting holes lined up with the case itself, I had to leverage the entire build against my body, squeeze the back of the case (thus bowing it back inward), and shove the card forward inside the enclosure. That's two hands and a spare tire already occupied. Now screw the card in.

I felt like cabling also could've been made easier by at least including some mounting holes in the motherboard tray under where an HPTX board would normally be, as Rosewill did in the Thor v2. In terms of reach for the drives and power cables, though, I'm less apt to complain: this is a large enclosure designed for large boards and long cables. Cables designed for normal-sized cases aren't going to cut it, and this isn't Cubitek's fault.

Getting the side panels back on was easy enough, but my misgivings about the mounting system bore themselves out when I moved the case to begin testing it. Simply put, the case rattles. It doesn't matter how much you tighten the screws for the side panels, they're going to rattle, and that's due to the fact that they're very large panels that are only being held on by four screws. Aluminum unfortunately just feels like a flimsy material (at least in this implementation), and even with some thin padding surrounding the side panels, it rattles. Cubitek advertises the HPTX ICE as being designed for silent running, but when you get to our test results you'll see it doesn't work out that way. There are precious few allowances made for acoustics in the HPTX ICE's design, and it shows.