SilverStone Kublai KL03

Examination:

The Kublai KL03 just isn't an extended ATX version of the KL02, but there are a number of other changes to be found as well. The first major change is that the SilverStone KL03 has a door on the front of the chassis. This door is made of aluminum and for a large part is made up of mesh to help with ventilation. On the center of the door is SilverStone's logo. Behind this door are four 5.25" drive bays, or seven drive bays if the HDD cage is removed from the bottom portion. There are also two 3.5" external bays and then on the inside are four 3.5" internal hard drive bays provided by the HDD cage. The HDD cage is similar to the Kublai KL02 where the drives can be accessed from the front of the chassis and the 120mm fan in front of it is easily removable. Like the SilverStone Temjin TJ10, the door on this chassis is removable.

On the KL02 the front panel connections and buttons were hidden behind a flap on the front bezel, but with the KL03 they have moved up to the top of the chassis. At the top of the case are two USB 2.0, one IEEE-1394 Firewire, microphone, and speaker connections. The power and reset buttons are in this area. Surprisingly, SilverStone hadn't put an eSATA port on this chassis. Unlike the more-expensive Temjin series where these front panel connectors are on the top of the chassis are hinged and can be concealed, this isn't the design for the third-edition Kublai.

On the side of the chassis there is the acrylic window and at the bottom of the window are a number of holes that align with the dual 120mm fan mounts. These holes/fan mounts are designed to push additional air towards the expansion slot area, where you may be running a multi-GPU configuration. These fan mounts are on a steel arm, which swings out so that you can work on the system, but this arm can be easily removed if you don't intend to use either of these fan mounts.

At the rear of the Kublai KL03 is a PSU mount at the top of the chassis, seven expansion slots, I/O panel, and a 120mm exhaust fan. Unlike the recent SilverStone Temjin cases that are quite water cooling friendly -- with some of them even having pre-drilled holes for tubing -- there are no such optimizations to be found with this lower-end case. For added ventilation, all of the expansion slot covers with the KL03 have an array of openings.

At the bottom of the case are four plastic feet. This isn't nearly as nice as the Temjin feet, but once again, this is the economized version from SilverStone.