Inside
Diving into the Ophion Evo isn’t very hard, the tempered glass panels on both sides are held in place with four thumbscrews each. Pulling those two panels opens up the case completely and it also takes away most of the weight. There isn’t much to the structure of this case without the glass. You have the motherboard backplate that runs up the middle of the case ¾ of the way to mount the motherboard too and then the aluminum around the outside. They ship the case with the long ribbon cable required for the unique layout of the motherboard on one side and the video card on the other installed already so you can see that wrapping up around on this side. It isn’t a high-end cable with extra metallic shielding on it so be careful with it when you are moving everything around. Ribbon cables for PCIe can be hit and miss as it is, it is a delicate connection.
So the left half of the motherboard side of the case is where the power supply is mounted. This case has support for a full ATX PSU which is a surprise, our Metis was the same way. But if you look closely you can also see how the motherboard standoffs are right next to the PSU so things are going to be tight once you get that in the case.
Initially, I was confused by the mounting holes that you can see just above where the PSU goes, they cross over the motherboard backplate but once I pulled the front panel of the case off I could better see what was going on. You can mount two 2/5 inch drives in the otherwise wasted space in the front of the case. A nice use of space. You can also get a better look at the power button here as well. There are two slots to allow for SATA and SATA power cables and adding the two drives doesn’t get in the way of cooling, CPU cooler size, radiator size, or video card length. I should also point out that the non-Evo model only has the one drive mount in this area due to its shorter height.
Speaking of CPU cooler size. If you decide to go with air cooling the Ophion Evo supports a cooler up to 90mm tall and it can’t be any larger than your ITX motherboard in any dimensions. There is an access hole to get at the back of the CPU but you will have to have your GPU removed to do it.
That said, going air cooling on the Ophion Evo would be silly, this is the larger version designed specifically to add more space for water cooling. You can see it up in the top portion of the case where the divider doesn’t get in the way. You have support for a full 240mm radiator and two 120mm fans. The non-Evo model is shorter and this area only supports two fans or hard drives. This Evo model doesn’t have those extra hard drive mounting holes up top, but why would you get the taller model and then not use that space.
The back side of the Ophion Evo is a lot thinner than the front, you just need to support a video card here. So this side does share space up top for the water cooling. But you can see how the ribbon cable comes pre-mounted a few inches up, you have support for a lot of video cards in this configuration. You have the full length of the case which gives you up to 330mm of space there. Then there are two slots and a half of a slot in extra space beside that to help with a lot of those 2+ wide video cards. Then up on top, there is just under an inch from the top of the PCI brackets to the top of the motherboard backplate. I will find out later if there is any more room beyond that with an AIO installed but even that space should be more than enough for just about every card you might want to put in here. The rest of the space on this side should come in handy with getting wiring cleaned up. You can see that all of the front panel cables already run through so the space should help in cleaning everything up when you build in the case. Which will be needed given both sides are glass.
