Rosewill R5 Black Mid Tower Case Review

Installing Hardware into the R5 chassis

Time for me to start installing my computer hardware into the Rosewill R5 chassis, and see if this oversized mid-tower is capable of handling my oversized computer components.

Installing the HDDs seems like a good place to start the installation. The R5 chassis uses HDD carriers, but these HDD carriers are of a tool-less design, so we do not need to use screws to secure the 3.5 HDD to the carrier. I should mention the HDD carriers can handle both 3.5 and the smaller 2.5 HDD/SSD counterparts. To install a 3.5 HDD we need to line up one side of HDD to the HDD carrier, then on the opposite side, gently pull on the side of the HDD carrier away from the HDD and slide it up to mounting holes of the HDD.

Now I did notice that these HDD carriers felt a bit flimsy, so you do not want to use a lot of force when installing the 3.5 HDDs into these carriers, or you may break the HDD carriers.

In order for us to install the smaller 2.5 HDD/SSDs on to the HDD carriers, we need to remove a side off of the HDD carriers. More specifically the part that has pins that secures the 3.5 HDD to the carrier. On the inside of the HDD carrier are four small tabs, 2 on front and 2 on rear of the carrier, gently squeeze the tabs together and remove the side off.

Rosewill should have just placed the 2.5 HDD/SSD mounting holes in the dead center of the HDD carriers instead of off to the side. This would save a lot of time and trouble to install the smaller 2.5 HDD/SSD drives into this chassis.

If you are using a 2.5 HDD/SSD all we need to do is line up the mounting holes of both the drive and carrier, locate the appropriate screws and secure it to the HDD carrier. A 2.5″ HDD (laptop drive) has the same exact mounting holes as an SSD.

The 2.5 HDD installed into the R5 chassis HDD carriers.

The upper 3 motherboard standoffs do not to be installed into the R5 chassis. Rosewill made the upper three motherboard mounts raised standoffs. You will need to install the remaining motherboard standoffs prior to installing your motherboard getting installed.

Getting the ASUS Rampage 2 Extreme motherboard into the R5 chassis and secured.

During the installation of the SATA cables to the HDDs, I noticed that because of the rear motherboard channel the R5 chassis uses, makes it impossible for me to gain access to my lower SATA ports on the ASUS Rampage 2 Extreme. So this chassis is unable to fully handle the larger full ATX motherboards that are similar to the size of the ASUS Rampage 2 Extreme.

A quick look at rear side of the motherboard tray once all of the PSU wires have been routed to their respected spots. The channels that Rosewill uses on the R5 chassis do clean up the back side of the motherboard area quite nicely. We can also see that the CPU cutout is very large to accommodate a wide variety of different motherboard types, and layouts in regards to the CPU mounting holes.

Rosewill places small little loops on to the channel so that we can use wire ties to hold back our PSU wires, and secure them to the motherboard tray.

Since the ASUS Rampage 2 Extreme motherboard does not have USB 3 capabilities, I decided to turn the front USB 3 IO port, into a useable USB 2 front IO port. This is accomplished with the USB 3 to USB 2 header adapter that is included with the Rosewill R5 chassis.

Which I thought was a rather nice touch to the R5 chassis, sometimes it is the little things that makes or breaks a chassis.

Looking at the optional bottom 120/140mm fan mount in the R5 chassis, from the looks of it, I have plenty of room to install a 120/140mm fan here and have it not get in the way of the PSU wires.

Your mileage may very, this is dependent on the size of your PSU, if it is a larger PSU then you may not be able to mount a fan here.

Final complete install of the Rosewill R5 chassis, we can see that the R5 chassis is capable of handling some rather large computer components. Just we have to be mindful on the size of the motherboard gets used with this chassis.