MGE Viper: Another Xtreme Gamer Creation

Internal Design

As we opened up the Viper, we were quickly blasted back to our look at the Sidewinder in mid-October. The Viper has the same internals as the Sidewinder in every aspect except the red paintjob (matching paint to the external shell), and we can, therefore, safely assume that they are both based on the same model.

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The internal structure includes drive bay mounts, which compose the entire front 1/3 of the chassis. There are a total of four 5-1/4" drive bays and six 3-1/2" drive bays, two of those being external for applications such as floppy drives, flash card readers, etc.

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Also, just like the Sidewinder, the Viper has no tool-less features for its drive bays. Being a gaming chassis, we would expect MGE to implement even the simplest type of tool-less device. At the least, we would have liked to see thumbscrews for securing the side panels if not the drive bays.

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One thing that worried us was the placement of the case's PC speaker at the bottom of the case, vertically in line with the drive bays. This puts the magnet bearing speaker about 3/4" below the bottom-most HDD, which could lead to data corruption. We recommend that either users remove this speaker or MGE change their design and move it to an area away from the drive bays.

The Viper does have plenty of space to work with. Besides the space to add up to six 3-1/2" drives and four 5-1/4" drives, there is plenty of clearance between the motherboard tray and the drive bays, 2-1/2" to be exact.

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The expansion slots also lack tool-less features. MGE has kept the traditional Philips head mounting screw method to secure add-on cards to the Viper.