A Closer Look - Inside

After removing the two main exterior panels, you are left with the body which has plenty of angles to easily access the interior for assembly, and you may even go as far as to remove the front easily as we will see later on during assembly. From these images, you can already see quite the cable mess from the five pre-installed units. A total of 10 cables will need to be hidden away and managed somehow. Unfortunately, Formula V Line continues the bare minimum approach and has decided to skip grommets or Velcro strips to aid in that endeavor.


The shroud of the case is vented with three reverse-bladed, 120 mm ARGB based fans installed. This is really cool to see, but about half of the surface area these sit on will be blocked by the PSU underneath the shroud, so we don't expect any large benefit in cooling from these. If you were to remove the unit at the very front, it would reveal a cable management hole to route your GPU power cable through. Even with the fans, the connectors at the bottom of the board should remain accessible, which is nice to see. Interestingly enough, the mesh panel is not riveted in place, but instead uses screws. That said, there seems to be no apparent reason to do so for the Crystal Z8 Floe, but it is nice to have the option. In the ceiling, you can clearly see that the cooler mounting holes are offset as far away from the motherboard as possible with compact cable routing holes to keep things as clean as possible.


On the bottom, you will find a basic HDD cage which may hold up to two 3.5" drives or one 2.5" and one 3.5" variant. You will find two 120 mm ARGB equipped fans on the side. These are reverse variants, and are clearly labeled as such as well. This means that you get to see the clean fronts of the fans within the Crystal Z8 Floe but also have the benefit of airflow being pulled into the case from this part of the chassis.


In the back, the PSU bay is basic but perfectly functional. Above that are the seven expansion slots with those six break-out covers. In the very top, there is that one more exhaust fan in the same style as the two on the side. This rounds up the six units within the chassis, of which five sport reverse fan blades to act as clean intake fans. The installed units don't only sport ARGB in the hubs but also come with LEDs built into the frames. This looks nice, but also means that the units have bigger hubs and thicker frames, thus this illumination comes at a cost of cooling performance.


Formula V Line has even omitted the 2.5" HDD mounting plate, continuing the cost minimizing efforts of the chassis body. This is unfortunate, as budget minded gamers may have 2.5" drives for their additional storage.


All the wires within the Formula V Line Crystal Z8 Floe are black. Only the USB-C is flat, while the USB-A lead has rounded wires. The motherboard header connector comes with the classic, individual leads instead of a single, unified plug. While that's just fine too, first time builders as well as system integrators would surely have appreciated making this step as simple as possible.