When people think of the greatest Mark Hamill movie of the late 1970's, their thoughts inevitably snap to 1978's Corvette Summer. This movie followed the adventures of Hamill's character restoring a junkyard-bound Stingray into an item of true beauty.

Or at least a 1978 standard of beauty. . .

Yes, improving on the standard of American auto-opulence previously set by the Black Pontiac Trans Am With Giant Gold Screaming Chicken Decal On The Hood (tm),

Hamill's 1978 epic cemented into the American mindset the image of the terrifically tricked-out American car. Following Corvette Summer, there was no rear spoiler that could be too high, no paint job too lusterous, no supercharger-housing on the hood too oddly-shaped, and no gold metal-flake flames too glittery. The sky was the limit, and the recent phenomenon of chrome wheel-spinners that give your car the illusion of movement even after it's been parked in the garage for an hour shows that it's still with us today.

And the "I must have an aggressive-looking car to make up for my obvious physical shortcomings" mindset has moved from cars to computers in the same way that the West Nile Virus moved from birds to humans. Simply having a rumbling supercharged processor/memory/drive configuration in your computer isn't enough anymore. It's now important for the outside of your computer to resemble a tricked-out American car and the inside to resemble the set of Tron.

Which brings me to the MGE Dragon computer case (also referred to as XG and XGBox). This isn't a case for a computer that'll sit in a server-closet. This isn't even a case for a computer that'll run Microsoft Office. This is a case for a computer that'll run noisy high-framerate 3D online first-person fragfests where people fire zillions of rounds from chainguns while screaming "SUCK IT DOWN" (Ion Storm trademark recently expired and inexplicably not renewed) into their headset microphones at LAN parties.

Heck, I'll bet if you installed Strawberry Shortcake's Amazing Cookie Party on a Dragon-endowed machine, it'd make a few crunching noises, then spit out shards of the CD on the floor.

On to the specifics!

Micro-ATX and ATX form-factor
500 watt power supply
Three fans (one in the front, one in the back, one in the power supply)
four 5.25" drive bays
six 3.5" drive bays (two exposed, four hidden)
top-mounted jacks for headphones, microphone, 2 USB and 1 Firewire
available in red, silver, black, blue, and purple

Here's my shiny red Dragon case as it came out of the scary-looking black box.

The first thing you may notice, even looking at it still wrapped in plastic, is that the case isn't as luxuriously shiny as it appears in the ads. While I wasn't expecting hand-rubbed lacquer, it just didn't quite have the panache that the advertising pictures led me to believe it had. I haven't yet dared to go over the case with a couple of coats of Wizard floor wax or NuKote car polish, so I'm not yet sure if I can get this thing into the showroom-shininess for which I was hoping.

Here's a head-on shot of the case, showing off the real "curb appeal" of the case.

Note that the case isn't as aggressively teardrop-shaped as the impression given by the web page. While it is a bit bulgy near the bottom, it's mostly rectangular.

If the front door appears to be a bit out of the perpendicular (especially near the bottom), that's not a problem with the camera. The bottom hinge didn't appear to be aligned properly, and the door wasn't seated right when closed completely. The door itself is held closed by a couple of magnets, but the bottom magnet didn't come in contact with the case, so it was being held on solely by the top magnet. The case arrived very well packed with plastic foam, so I don't think this misaligned door happened in shipping. If you want one of these cases, check the alignment of the parts first. Since the front door is held together with rivets, it doesn't look like you can adjust things after the fact.

Here's the unit head-on with the front door opened.

There's your four big drive bays and two little ones (with the rest extending down below the two little ones). At first I was worried that the door wouldn't open up far enough for a CD tray to completely extend (the door's open as far as it'll go in the picture), but I took a ruler to it, and a CD tray will indeed eject all the way without bumping into the door. If you've got some kind of oddball cartidge-based drive or optical storage, though, you might want to get a ruler and make sure you'll have an easy time removing the cartridge without hitting the door.

There's a little trapezoidal cover on top of the unit that houses ports for USB, headphone, microphone, and Firewire.

They're quite easy to get to and are spaced well enough apart that it should be easy to plug stuff in. The USB ports are stacked one on top of another, so if you've got a couple of largish thumb drives or other items that are higher than a USB port itself, you'll probably have to get one of those little adapter cords to use both ports at once.

It's a tool-free case, which is nice, although it's not as innovative as others I've seen. I'm not as impressed by innovative and unique case-opening techniques as some. In fact, I'm amused by those affected with "open up my Macintosh syndrome", which is an affliction suffered by people who are immensely proud of their late-model tower Macs. Syndrome victims always feel the need to show you how astoundingly easy it is to open the case. In fact, I think the new Mac tower cases are telepathic and simply open themselves when they sense that you'd like them opened. As long as a case is reasonably easy to access and build, that's good enough for me. I open my computer's case less often than my car's hood, so as long as it's not significantly more difficult than that, I'm happy. The Dragon case has side-panels that open easily with a couple of thumb-wheels, not much differently from the 3 year-old Compaq in my office.

One new addition I saw in the "tool free" arsenal are a set of plastic locking gizmos for the drives. While you could mount the drives in the case with a traditional set of screws (and you might still have to if the screws are oddly placed), the Dragon does come with some plastic oval-shaped locks that can hold your drives in place. Once the drive's where you want it, you just twist the little locking knob on the side, and the drive will stay put. If it's not secure enough or you've got oddly-placed holes on the side of your drive, you can see that there's plenty of space to mount the drives the old fashioned way.

In addition to the sliding side-panels, the motherboard and PCI backplane are all mounted in an L-shaped drawer. This makes installing the motherboard and PCI cards pretty easy, although I think things will be pretty hairy once you've got a couple-dozen cables in there all reaching around to the drives and power supply and internal ports. It's held in place by four smaller thumbscrews.

Here's the bottom of the case, complete with lighted LCD temperature indicator screen.

The three buttons under the screen allow you to set the time. The display shows CPU temperature, current time, RPM for up to three fans, and CPU uptime. You can also set an alarm so the computer will complain if your CPU is about to go volcanic.

One other feature I like is that the little "feet" on the case (pictured above) rotate out. Hopefully this'll make the legs less likely to break off when you're transporting the case.

Finally, here's a picture of the back of the unit with the "Static Guard Wire Manager" installed. This is a giant plastic rack that extends from the back of the case about three inches. I don't know about static or wire-management, but it does look like it'd be useful in keeping the computer from getting mashed against a wall so closely that the two rear fans wouldn't be effective.

I think it'd just be better to leave your cables on the floor and be mindful of your computer's distance to the wall, though, as this thing makes the back of the computer really difficult to access. For one, it's held on by the same four thumbscrews that hold on the side panels. That means that if you want to slide off a side panel for any reason, you'll have to remove all four screws and the rack. And the screws don't have too much "bite" into their respective threaded holes on the case with this thing installed. It required a lot of pressing and wrestling to get all four threaded in, and that was with it sitting on my lap. I can only imagine what a chore it'd be to open this case if it was sitting on the floor next to my desk.

And, needless to say, it cages in the motherboard tray quite nicely. If you wanted to do anything that required that try be removed, you'll have to unscrew all eight thumbscrews on the back. Thinking of that task suddenly makes me envy those with "open up my Macintosh syndrome".

In addition to the misaligned door, there were a couple of fit and finish problems here and there. The plastic gizmo that locks all of the PCI cards into place (rather than individual screws) didn't lock very securely, and I'd be pretty wary of trying to wriggle a cable out of the back of a PCI card, lest I accidentally work the card out of the slot. There were a couple of spots of missing paint, but they were thankfully in spots that you wouldn't see in day to day use, like the big back-mounted cable-organizer.

Oops, missed a spot.

Powering it up:

Well, there's more I'd like to say about how well it works in the field and how cool the display looks, but I can't. I purchased a motherboard, memory, hard drive, and optical drive with the intention of building this into a gaming PC, but I ran into a big snag, namely that the vaunted 500-watt power supply was dead. No power-on, no fans, no nothing. Thinking that this would give me a chance to see what kind of tech support I can get for a premium-priced case, I called their tech support hotline. I was sent to an answering machine where I described my problem. They never called back. I then decided to try out their web-based tech support, but the support URL in the manual brought up a "page not found" error. Doing a little more surfing, I found a web-form where I could describe my problem. I described my problem and left my contact info, but that also proved fruitless.

Looks like I'll have to purchase someone else's power supply if I want to power this thing up.

Conclusion:

Let's be honest here. Mark Hamill didn't spend all his time customizing his Stingray so that he could drive it to the grocery store, and you're not buying a case like this to sit on a floor and be ignored. Those 70's muscle cars were heavy and finicky and handled like tanks, but they were shiny and looked cool. And this is no different. This is a big heavy difficult-to-open case with a ridiculous lighted aluminum front-door, LED-lit spinning fans, and a dragon-etched window on the side so you can show off your dramatically-lit nVidia 99000xpzxr video accelerator. It's got a big handle on the top for a reason, and that reason is that you'll be taking this thing around to your pals' houses for LAN parties and to show off your computer's newest lighted ground-effects. If you're just building a computer that'll sit in the corner and compile code for you, you don't need a Dragon. You could save a hundred bucks by buying a plain gray case with a good power supply and fans. If you're wanting something that looks aggressive and you're willing to put up with a misaligned door and you're willing to replace the dead parts yourself, a Dragon might be what you need.

Pros:

• Beefy 500 watt power supply (that hopefully works in the one you buy)

• Three fans already installed (two of which are lighted)

• Nice removable motherboard tray

• Big comfy handle on top makes it easy to carry

• Easy plastic locking thingies to hold drives in place

• Display presumably shows fan speed, CPU temp, time, and computer's up-time, not that I could actually try it out

• Easy access to USB, Firewire, microphone and headphone jacks

• Stabilizing feet swing out from the bottom

• Big lighted shiny aggressive-looking dragon cutout on the front door

Cons:

• Finish was flatter than ads showed

• Misaligned front door

• Dead power supply

• One of the drive locking thingies had the lock installed backwards

• Despite "tool free" nature, it's still quite difficult to open

• Minor finish problems

• Nonexistent tech support

• Big wire guard static gizmo makes opening the case very complicated

• It's $189