The Air X ARGB has more than enough features to justify its price, and now’s the time to see how it performs!
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That the Air X ARGB can be had for less than $80 is something I constantly keep in mind when looking at cost-cutting features such as an encased front-panel filter and a power supply filter that’s secured using tabs rather than slide brackets. Buyers still get a pair of 200mm ARGB intake fans and a 120mm ARGB exhaust fan along with a tempered glass side panel to view everything after all, and cases with a full fan set and tempered glass tend to cost at least 10% more. But now it’s time to build.
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My platform uses only a single M.2 SSD, but I’ve tossed in a couple old 2.5” drives to show fitment. A slight misalignment for the cable holes pushes against the SATA data cable when using the factory drive tray position atop the power supply shroud, but the cable still latches, and users who have a problem with that are welcome to secure this tray to the tab and screw holes to the left of it.
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There’s nothing to prevent straight cables from plugging into the drive tray that’s on the back of the motherboard tray, but it sits too far above the power supply opening to use 90° cables.
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My test platform already had its Ryzen 7 3700X, Toshiba OCZ SSD and PNY XLR8 memory installed on MSI’s MEG X570 ACE, so I added the Air X ARGB's three additional standoffs to support the front of the ATX motherboard, secured the board with nine screws, added Fractal Design’s Celsius S24 cooler to the top panel and CPU socket, and finally installed Gigabyte’s RTX 2070 graphics card. Two things to note are the extra 1.25” (32mm) of space between the front edge of this full-ATX motherboard and the cable access holes, and the overlap between the radiator fans and the top of the board. The extra space allows proper cable management for EATX boards up to 10.9” deep, and the liquid cooling kit's overlap is made possible by the top-panel's offset mounting points.
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With all the cables connected, everything works with synchronous lighting. Maybe I should have used some RGB memory as well?