Quirky chassis says: Bring on the big boards (but not lots of drives)
Years back, when a small website called out for product-review editors. I leapt at the opportunity: I’d just wrapped up a four-year stint as a systems supplier. That experience provided the credentials I’d need for the transition from industry supplier to industry observer. For one thing, I’d been the first source for an exposé on capacitor plague (“Got Juice”) at EDN.
In Win’s N515 is a flashy, quirky midtower with a funky front panel. It's designed for power-system builders who need lots of cooling, but only a few non-M.2 drives.
The move to M.2 storage has much reduced the number of drive bays needed in most gaming and power-user desktops. Because of that, PC case manufacturers have trimmed the cost of drive cages from their materials bills of lading, labeling the voids they once occupied as bays for "water pumps" and "reservoirs." But not until motherboards with four or more PCI Express NVMe M.2 slots (and SSDs with more than 1TB of capacity) saturated the market could manufacturers comfortably apply those concepts to a workstation-style chassis. In Win’s N515 ($209) steps into that space with room for full 13-inch-deep Extended ATX motherboards (and all the standoffs needed to stabilize them!), enormous power supplies, and at least one (maybe two) triple-fan radiators...though only four case-mounted drives. A funky infinity-mirror panel on the front face gives this quirky chassis some personality to go along with its tight storage potential.
The N515's two-chamber design (one above, one below) places a triple-fan side radiator mount and a glass front panel on the upper half of the chassis, and a glass-sided motherboard chamber with a vented front panel on the bottom.
The upper part of the glass front is home to the optical-illusion light-up front face, which In Win dubs the Nebula Panel...
The infinite-regression effect comes from layered mirrors. In Win is probably the world leader in PC cases with infinity illusions on the front; this is far from its first.
The power supply also mounts up top, on the opposite side from the radiator mount. A slit pattern on the steel right panel provides exhaust for any side-mounted radiator, but it will more likely feed unfiltered air into the power supply if no upper-chamber fans have been installed.
The front-panel ports comprise two USB 3.0 Type-A and one USB 3.2 Type-C, the former using a Gen 1 and the latter a Gen 2 internal motherboard header. Headphone and microphone jacks are separate, and two holes between the power button and ports provide a line of sight to power and drive-activity indicator LEDs.
A full-length fan filter slides out from the left edge of the N515’s bottom panel and covers three additional 120mm fan mounts. These mounts are drilled in two positions to provide greater or lesser motherboard clearance as desired, and we found nothing but PCI Express card placement to prevent super-thick radiators from being installed here despite In Win’s claims that only slim radiators are suitable.
An ARGB lighting cable is the only thing that prevents easy removal of the N515’s front panel, behind which are two 120mm fan mounts suitable for securing a dual-fan radiator without getting in the way of card installation.
A button on the rear of the case unlatches the top of the glass side panel, allowing it to pivot outward and be lifted from tab slots on the bottom rail of its opening. A hole in the button allows users to further secure the side panel with a small padlock.
While the manual appears to indicate that the filter covering the upper radiator mount might be removed by squeezing some tabs and pushing up, our experience was that yanking it off by the two tabs at the bottom is the only method that really works. Users can then install a “360mm” radiator that’s up to 405mm long, with 95mm of power-supply clearance exceeding the manufacturer’s stated 80mm combined radiator and fan thickness limit.
Drive support is via two 2.5-inch trays on the front and two 3.5-inch/2.5-inch trays on the back of the motherboard tray. A total of four drives may be mounted.
Designed exclusively to fit the builder’s choice of liquid coolers, the N515 has just one included fan: an 1,800rpm Luna AL120 ARGB model mounted on the rear panel as an exhaust. The fan includes passthrough connectors for both its PWM and ARGB leads, allowing users to daisy-chain additional fans.
In Win claims a 200mm length limit for power supplies, but we found nothing short of the cable passage placement to prevent use from using power supplies up to at least 280mm, after which a short cable tie loop might get in the way. Passages for cables include an oddly shaped slot next to the power-supply bay for sliding in ATX12V/EPS12V cables, a center-left slot suitable for main ATX/EPS (24-pin) power, and a gigantic square hole for CPU water-block passthrough.
Front-panel cables include an AT-style power indicator lead with ATX-style pigtail, HDD LED, power button, HD Audio, ARGB for the front panel (with pass-through for the ARGB fan), a USB 3.x Gen 2 for the Type-C port, and a USB 3.x Gen 1 for the twin Type-A ports.
Installation hardware includes a motherboard screw pack with enough standoffs to support any ATX-based format up to 13 inches deep, M3 and #6-32 screws for drive mounting, a set of washers for radiator installation, 10 cable ties, an optional one-click ARGB controller that anyone with an ARGB motherboard header won’t need, and an extension for the factory-mounted graphics card brace. A rubber block that slides onto that extension is intended to dampen vibration. The user manual is nothing more than a QR code for the online document.
Despite is grandiose dimensions, the N515's interior has very little top-to-bottom motherboard clearance. Those whose boards have built-in I/O shields will find that there’s only one way to install them: bottom first. Here’s what happened when we tried to tilt the top in first...
Even correcting our mistake didn’t get us much farther ahead, as the included fan blocked the top edge of our built-in I/O shield from sliding all the way back to its mounting face. We ended up having to remove the rear fan, install our motherboard, and then re-install that fan.
The good part of having a tight motherboard fit is that surrounding panels will act as an air duct over its components. The bad is that we won’t be able to reach the latches on our ATX12V/EPS12V connectors until after we remove our motherboard. It's just too close-fitting up there.
Our standardized test hardware may lack the adornment of In Win’s fan-packed show configuration, but the included ARGB LED strip that surrounds the N515’s infinity-mirror front panel ornament still cycles color in the same pattern as its one included ARGB fan. It's pretty nifty.
Okay, enough fun with the pretty lights! Now, a look at the components in our testing setup for the N515:
We'll map the results against some recently tested large cases: Cooler Master's HAF 500, Corsair's iCUE 5000T RGB, and Lian Li's O11 Dynamic EVO.
The N515’s front radiator mount has impressively good airflow, but part of this configuration’s 2-to-3-degree C CPU benefit comes from the lack of system heat entering it. Our next chart will show why this builder prefers to top-mount radiators when possible.
Whatever we gained in CPU temperature by front-mounting the radiator was lost twofold in increased voltage-regulator temperatures. The N515 simply doesn’t have a place to mount the exhaust fans directly over the voltage regulators, but we have a feeling that any builder who chooses to pack their N515 with fans in all of its other mounting locations will have better results.
Our graphics card was also a bit warmer in the N515, but not by a startling amount. Builders who don’t need access to their motherboard’s bottom slot may choose to take advantage of the case’s bottom fan mounts, though we don’t recommend putting a closed-loop radiator there, since there is the potential for any air bubbles to rise into the pump. (That’s why custom liquid-cooling loops have reservoirs.)
One disadvantage of a front panel with nice, free airflow is that it often allows more noise to exit, particularly any noise from front-mounted fans. Much of the N515’s deficit in this chart is caused directly by our front-mounted cooler, but without it, the system wouldn’t have posted such stellar CPU temperatures.
The N515’s "Nebula Panel" infinity mirror may get most of the initial attention, but its design is really all about raw space. Builders get room for a 13-inch-deep motherboard along with the standoffs to secure it, plus two triple-fan radiators. With 18 inches of space between the card slots and the front panel, even the longest of current graphics cards leave several inches up front to add an oversize liquid-cooling reservoir. With all this space for performance-boosting components, what’s not to love about the N515?
Though it may appear a minor complaint, the extremely tight space around the integrated I/O shield of our motherboard is worth another mention, since so many motherboards now have integrated I/O shields. Moreover, any fans and/or radiators mounted to the bottom of the case will detract as much thickness from PCIe slot space, so that those who choose to install a second radiator there could be stuck with only enough space for a single graphics card, depending on the thickness of the radiator and the slot layout of the motherboard. (That said, that's not a problem for most PC builders in these days of waning CrossFireX, NVLink, and SLI.)
And while the side-mounted top radiator bracket adds style and potential liquid cooling performance, the panel separating it from the motherboard would reduce airflow over the motherboard. There’s also a limit of four internal drives (only two of which can be 3.5-inch), but onboard storage trends mean that this will likely affect few, if any, of the N515’s buyers.
It’s not perfect, but is the N515 good enough for a power-user PC? For many, if the infinitely-regressing Nebula Panel catches their eye, a special price of $209 at one of In Win’s direct sites(Opens in a new window) could make that decision a little easier.
In Win’s N515 is a flashy, quirky midtower with a funky front panel. It's designed for power-system builders who need lots of cooling, but only a few non-M.2 drives.
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Years back, when a small website called out for product-review editors. I leapt at the opportunity: I’d just wrapped up a four-year stint as a systems supplier. That experience provided the credentials I’d need for the transition from industry supplier to industry observer. For one thing, I’d been the first source for an exposé on capacitor plague (“Got Juice”) at EDN.
By that time, I’d already self-published some guidelines on hardcore PC stuff: pin-modifying processors to defeat compatibility checks and overclock non-overclockable systems. I saw a chance to get paid for my knowledge, and have since written more than a thousand pieces (many of them for the seminal tech site Tom's Hardware) before finding my latest opportunity: with PCMag.
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