Putting it together
After setting our power supply into the bottom tray, the rest of our basic test system install went smoothly.

Can you spot the problem?

The hard drive mounting system works well and doesn't require tools. However, we really don't see much point to the rubber strips considering that they only cover a small portion of the drive once it's properly installed. Each drive has to go into its predetermined slot, so there's no choice but to line them up right between each absorption strip/heatsink combination.

Our motherboard went in next, and we were pleased to see that our large Silverstone CPU cooler fitted with an Antec tri-cool 120mm fan fit into the case without any problems. The DVD burner went in just as easily, and with the supplied thumbscrews, we were easily able to get a perfect fit with the stealthy eject button and tray cover.

Up and running

Looking at our fully-assembled system, it's clear the Osiris can house larger-than-normal video cards. With massive cards like the GeForce GTX 280, case design becomes much more of an issue than it used to be. We're confident the Osiris would make a fine choice for even the longest of video cards, just as long as you position your drives accordingly. A sufficiently long graphics card in one of the bottom three ATX motherboard slots might run into the hard drive cage, but one could probably work around this conflict by placing the hard drive cage near the top of the case or by using the supplied external 3.5" drive adapter for a single drive instead.

While the Osiris will house a Flex-ATX, Micro-ATX, or standard ATX motherboard just fine, it doesn't have mounting points for extended ATX mobos. We'd recommend checking out Cooler Master's Cosmos if you need to squeeze in a server or workstation board.

Test results
Although our simple install in the Osiris certainly won't tax its thermal capabilities as much as some enthusiast's rigs, it will give us a general idea of how cool the case keeps various components. We used a basic nForce-based Micro-ATX motherboard with an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ CPU, along with a GeForce 6600 GT, a 300GB SATA hard drive, and an NEC DVD-R/RW optical drive in our test system. As I said, we opted for a Silverstone CPU heatsink fitted with a 120mm Antec Tri Cool fan and a Zalman VF-700 Cu cooler for the video card. After loading the computer with rthdribl for the GPU and/or Prime 95 for the CPU, we measured the temperatures with SpeedFan.

Keep in mind that we're using aftermarket coolers for both the CPU and GPU. More and more people are comfortable with heatsink swaps, even on graphics cards, and that shouldn't skew our evaluation of the case. Furthermore, we've scaled back every fan in the case to run slower than normal; we have our tri-cool CPU fan running at its low setting, and we have two of the 120mm case fans (and the GPU fan as well) connected to a three-pin to four-pin molex adapter that actually gives the fan 5V instead of 12V. Hiper included some three-pin to four-pin molex adapters, but they're designed to use the usual 12V line. I used a Zalman FanMate controller to bring the third 120mm fan down to a level that was inaudible above the other fans, too. After these adjustments to fan speeds were made, I used a sound level meter and got a reading of 24 dBA 12" from the front of the case and 25 dBA 12" from the side. That's fantastically quiet.

This CPU cooler is huge, but even bigger ones should fit comfortably in the Osiris

This case is darn near silent with these simple modifications, and with any normal amount of background noise, a system in the Osiris should be impossible to notice by sound alone. With results like these, it's a real shame more case manufacturers don't bundle the 5V versions of those 4-pin-to-3-pin fan adapters. 12V is wholly unnecessary for proper cooling in the Osiris, save for maybe a super-overclocked quad-core with dual Radeon 4870s. It'd be especially nice for Hiper to include these adapters (or at least a basic three-way switch like Antec does) considering the Osiris is already designed with simplicity in mind.