Side panels
The right side panel is a fairly standard affair with no grills or fancy frills. It does, though, have a sculpured handle making it easier to slide back for removal. In contrast, the left panel - the one that gives access to the top side of the motherboard - has some nice touches.
The Gigabyte name is stamped into the panel towards the bottom front and there are two perforated areas towards the rear, one above the other.
The square, bottom-most set of perforations is a basic aid to airflow - it has no fan or filter. Just above that vent is another sculpted handle to aid removal of the panel.
[advert]The raised, circular perforated area at the top carries an air duct on its internal side and this sits directly over the CPU when the panel is in place. The duct is no help to cooling if you're using a stock cooler as we did and it may be a major hinderance if, like so many enthusiasts, you intend to fit a far larger and more efficient third-party CPU cooling fan.
On the upside, the duct on the Triton 180 is attached with four self tapping screws, so it's not hard to remove if room is required for a large, third-party cooler.
On the downside, removing the screws is going to leave the side panel with four rather ugly holes. Given the raised profile of that area, these holes are going to be very noticeable.
Gigabyte might consider including some rubber plugs to fill these holes - though plugs might look just as bad as holes (or worse) if used with either version of the case that has silver side panels.
For those models, a better option might be a plastic ring - silver-coated on its outer face - that sits behind the grill and is held in place by the screws for the duct.
Some users might feel that the best option is to remove the duct and replace it with a low-noise fan. The distance between screw-holes is 70mm and may allow the fitting of an 80mm fan.
However we'd be concerned that fitting a fan to the side panel might cause vibration problems and make the chassis a whole lot noisier than it would otherwise be.