NZXT LEXA S Crafted Series PC Chassis

Today for review I’ve got another product from NZXT, another chassis called the Lexa S that is nicely made and designed.  It features four fans pre-installed and even a fan controller built into the case to control those fans. Overall the case is nicely designed and manufacture red, but it’s not without its faults…

Specifications:

LEXA S Crafted Series

Black Steel Mid Tower Chassis
As with all of NZXT’s cases, Lexa S is designed for enhanced airflow with capability for 5 fans including 120mm fans on the front, side, and exhaust with a 140 mm fan on top. NZXT includes the side, rear, top, and front fans along with a fan controller that controls dual intakes and exhausts independently and effectively optimizes your computers performance based on your preference for pure power or whisper quiet operation.

Lexa S offers gamers sleek aesthetics with a smoked clear window and all black interior along with a 5.25″ stealth bay, turned HDD cage, and punched holes in the motherboard which makes for a cleaner look and gives enthusiasts a solution for superior cable management. Additional features include a bracket for two Solid State Drives.

Features
* Immense Performance: 4 of 5 fans included ( Front 120mm fan, Top 140mm fan, Side 120MM LED fan, rear 120mm exhaust included ), fans rated at 43CFM, 23dB(A)
* Fan control: Determine noise and airflow based on your needs, dual intakes and dual exhausts are controlled independently
* Black on Black: Smoked clear window and a black interior gives the best combination of black on black.
* Meshed front panel allows for more airflow
* NZXT Solid State bracket allows for two SSD drives to be installed
* Wire Routing: Motherboard punched holes allows for quick CPU bracket removable and optimal wire routing.
* Turned HDD also helps with providing a cleaner look.
* Pre-drilled water cooling holes on the back plate
* High end graphics card support, extra space is especially designed to fit longer 10.5″ cards
* Side mounted USB, Audio, and E-SATA ports
* Mounting holes for dual radiator at the top
* Removable filter at the bottom PSU
* Rubber Grommet for wire routing gives a even sleeker look to the system

Specs:
MODEL: Lexa S SERIES
CASE TYPE: MID TOWER Black interior chassis
FRONT PANEL MATERIAL: Steel
DIMENSIONS (W x H x D): 196 X 480 X 528 mm

COOLING SYSTEM:
FRONT, 1 x 120mm , 23db/42CFM (included)
SIDE, 1 x 120mm LED fan@1200RPM, 23db/42CFM (included)
TOP, 2 x 140/120mm ( 1 140mm included)
REAR, 1 x 120mm, 23db/42CFM (included)

DRIVE BAYS:
11 DRIVE BAYS
4 EXTERNAL 5.25″ DRIVE BAYS
7 INTERNAL 3.5″ DRIVE BAYS

MATERIAL(S):Steel Construction
EXPANSION SLOTS: 7
WEIGHT: 7 KGS (W/O Power)
MOTHERBOARD SUPPORT: MOTHERBOARDS: ATX, MICRO-ATX, BABY AT

Unboxing:
The Lexa S comes in an attractive looking box and the case inside is well packed for protection. There’s even a protective plastic covering on the bezel and side window as well to insure it makes it to you without a scratch.

The front bezel is sort of a sharp wedge shaped design and the side view is very distinctive with the bezel being higher than the rest of the case.

Opening the front door reveals four 5.25” drive bays and one 3.5” bay, you’ll also see the power and reset buttons along with the fan controller knobs. There are two knobs, but each knob controls two fans.

On the left side of the bezel is where you’ll find the USB, eSATA and audio ports.

On the top you’ll find one fan pre-installed with space for another for added cooling abilities.

The right side panel is just plain, there is an indentation to help you remove the panel though.

The left side is a smoke colored window with a fan pre-installed.

Moving to the back of the case we find the usual things, exhaust fan, PCI slots, space for PSU, I/O plate and we find two rubberized holes for optional liquid cooling near the top.

On the bottom of the Lexa S we find rubber feet and a removable air filter for the power supply.

Both side panels are held on by thumbscrews which makes life easier when you’re installing the system.  Once you have the left side panel off you can get a closer view of the fan as well.

The inside of Lexa S is painted black. Here’s several views of the inside.

The motherboard features rubberized long holes for routing your cables.

Installed in the hard drive bay is the SSD adapter, with it you can install two 2.5” SSDs or regular hard drives if you wish.

All of the fans have both Molex and 3 pin power connections. The wires for the Lexa S include the normal things along with a Molex connection for the fan controller. The fan controller also has two dual 3pin connections as well.

The small brown box has the user manual, HDD drive rail and screws in it for installation. There are thumbscrews for installing the 5.25” bay devices.

Removing the right panel we can really see how the motherboard has a large cut out where the CPU would be installed, this make life much easier when swapping CPU coolers as you won’t have to remove the motherboard from the case.

The front bezel pops off to reveal the front 120mm fan with included fan filter. Here you can get a better look at all of the wiring as well.

Installation, Performance, Comparison
There’s plenty of room to install a system in the Lexa S, for my installation I used an older system, a P4 based one. My friend had some parts lying around and asked me to build a system for his young daughter. It’s just for doing homework and browsing the internet so nothing powerful is really needed, this little P4 system will do the job just fine.

The system was originally in a Compaq case that was beat up and dirty really, the entire system was full of dust and just downright nasty really. So I pulled the CPU and chipest heatsink off and replaced the thermal compound for him with some Coolink Chilleramic, it’s much better than the gunk that Compaq used when building the system. Even though it was a proprietary case everything fit just fine in the Lexs S.

I really like the fact that thumbscrews are used for the optical drives, it makes life easier and the installation that much quicker.

I utilized the holes in the board to pass the ribbon cables though as well for the hard drive, and I zip tied everything that I could to make things look a bit nicer.

Here’s the back side view of the case so you can see how the spot with the CPU is mounted:

The side window is smoked in color but still transparent enough to see the system inside.

Once powered on the front bezel lights up with a few different blue LEDs and the side fan also has blue LEDs in it.

The included fan controller works very well. I have it hooked up so that I can control the front and side fan with one knob and the top and rear exhaust with the other knob. Intake and exhaust can be easily controlled now with just the twist of the knob. There’s enough fans already in the case to keep things nice and cool, even at low speeds the temperature inside are cool. On low speed the fans are virtually silent but when you turn them up to full speed they are audible and for me personally a bit too loud. For a basic system you won’t need to turn the fan up to high as they do a decent job at providing good airflow even on low speeds.

There’s plenty of room inside of the Lexa S for most any system, you should be able to get large sized video cards in there without a problem.

The addition of the wire management holes do make things a lot easier and of course it keeps things neat and tidy. I like how they are rubberized, they not only protect the wires but they hold them in place as well since the rubber is cut to hold the wires tight.

I did run across one problem with the Lexa S though. There are holes in the motherboard for wire management as we know, but there’s one near the top that should be used for the extra power connector for the motherboard. many motherboards have the 4pin power connection near the top, and the hole there makes it so you can route the wire behind the motherboard. The problem is two-fold really though. The hole seems a bit too small to get the connector through it, it fit but not without a fight. The second problem is that there’s almost no room between the hole opening and the top mounted fan. It took quite a bit of struggling to get that power connection though there and connected to the motherboard. You could of course move the one fan to the front spot, but then if you wanted to have two fans installed you’d end up with the same problem again. The only fix I could see would be to modify the design of the case to make it a little bit taller, if the case was a half inch to inch taller it would be fine, and you’d have enough room to work.

Another work around would be to install the CPU after you get the wires hooked to the motherboard, then you’d have a little bit more room to work, but then you’d run across the space issue while installing the CPU.

Conclusion:
The NZT Lexa S is a very nice case overall in both quality and design. The addition of the fan controller is very much appreciated and it makes controlling the temperature and noise level of your case easy.

The fact that the motherboard is cut out to allow you to easily swap CPUs is a great feature that I think should be on every motherboard tray. I personally hate to take the entire motherboard out just to install a CPU cooler.

The additional little features like the thumbscrews for the 5.25” bays and the rubberized wire management holes are a nice touch as well.

The one issue I mentioned about being very cramped near the top fan is one that I don’t like at all really, it’s easy to get your system in the case up to that point and once you’re at that point you can get frustrated. The design at that point stopped being good really, someone just wasn’t thinking clearly when they made that are so tight to work in.

Pros:
+Lots of room
+Looks great
+Cools well

Cons:
-Very cramped near top fan

Ratings
Overall: 4 out of 5
Performance: 5  out of 5
Aesthetic: 4 out of 5
Build Quality: 4 out of 5

I would like to thank NZXT for the opportunity to review the Lexa S and for their support of Bona Fide Reviews.

Tagged as: Black, Case, Chassis, Lexa S, nzxt, PC, Review, ssd, Window