The riser slots come with snap-out blanks and have a hinged latch plate to hold your accessory cards in place. I have used this style of tool-less card retention before and my only complaint with it is that all of your cards must be aligned together before closing the plate, and when opening they all come loose at once. With a desktop case this is not really an issue but in a tower design the cards often like to slide down when not held in place. At least the blanks snap in rather than relying on the latch to hold them, that's a plus.
The top half of the case rear holds the two 120mm exhaust fans stacked above the motherboard I/O panel. As is common in a full tower case, there is a support bar to provide additional stiffness front-to-rear. This bar, and the matching one on the opposite side, also have ledges for the power supply to rest on. I thought it strange, however, to see this tab on the motherboard tray that normally provides the power supply support in many mid-tower cases. Obviously this is nowhere near the bottom of the power supply in the full tower X-Jupiter.
The motherboard tray contains threaded holes for mounting the brass standoffs, and each is labeled to match up with the legend at the bottom. There's a rather large bundle of wires for the fans, fan controllers, motherboard headers and temperature sensors, but each is clearly marked either with a tag on the wire or a label on the connector itself. A plastic case containing all the rails and mounting hardware is located at the bottom of the internal 3½" bay cage and can be removed to provide additional space for up to six hard drives mounted in a sideways fashion. Also you will notice three of the rivets that are used throughout the X-Jupiter to attach parts together... I found these laying in the bottom of the case. Unlike the Junior version, the drive cage is not removable on the X-Jupiter and the intake fan must be accessed from the front of the case.
Above the cage are slots for an additional two external 3½" devices and five 5¼" drives. Despite the door on the front being made of aluminum, the rest of the panel is plastic, as are the blank bay covers. Although Apevia has left holes on either side of the blanks, supposedly for ease of removal, I found them difficult to take out in this way and ended up pulling the entire front panel off the case to get to the clips from the rear. As mentioned previously, the bottom of the front panel has a very open vented design that is beneficial to good intake cooling. Unfortunately the mounting of the drive cage, with its near solid sides, severely restricts this airflow.
Continue as I install some hardware in the X-Jupiter.
