Expansion support includes three exposed 5.25" bays, seven hidden 3.5" bays, two 2.5" bays (converted from one 3.5" drive bay), seven standard expansion slots and an eighth vertically-aligned slot for I/O brackets.
Cooling is managed by a single rear 120mm fan that features red LEDs that can be turned off. That is the extent of the pre-installed fans, which is one of the weakest packages we have seen in recent times, though considering the quality of this case and its $90 asking price, we understand certain sacrifices had to be made.
Having less cooling gear out of the box isn’t necessarily a bad thing as you have more options for what fans will be installed and where. There is plenty of flexibility here as a pair of 120mm top fans can be installed along with a pair of front 120mm fans, two 120mm side fans, a bottom 120mm fan and finally a 120mm hard drive cage fan. Other internal features include tool-less 5.25" drive bays that make it simple to install optical devices. Likewise, 3.5" drives can also be mounted using special tool-free brackets. The seven 3.5" bays are separated into two cages: the bottom one supporting three drives and the top one supporting four. You’ll have to sacrifice the larger top cage if you want to install graphics cards over 11.3" (287mm), but if it comes to that, the Scout 2 has you covered as it supports cards up to 15.7" (399mm) long.
Unsurprisingly, the motherboard tray has a hole below the CPU socket for simplified heatsink installations, and there’s a ton of space to conceal your unsightly cables. It should also be easy to feed your liquid-cooling tubes into the case courtesy of the two inch-wide holes in the top rear. The Scout 2 can handle heatsinks up to 6.4" (162mm) tall. We expected a little more headroom from a case that measures 9.1" (230mm) wide, but the Scout 2 will still accommodate most high-end air coolers.
There isn’t much else to talk about inside the Scout 2. It may not be the most luxurious chassis around, but it’s a solid package for $90 and we can’t really fault it for lacking features such as a fan controller.
