Having previously ordered a similarly priced case on Amazon that turned out to be a complete waste of money, I was apprehensive about this Rosewill offering. However I can report the case is very functional, even for a high end (in terms of components) build.
My system is a 3900X, 1660 super, 32GB RAM, optical drive, hard drive, dual NVMe type 4, dual SSD with wifi-6 internet card. The graphic card is weak but I'm waiting for RDNA2 before spending big bucks.
So the good.
Plenty of room for hard drives, SSD, optical drive, even an SD/USB3.0 front panel expansion board.
Plenty of room for cabling from my 750W modular power supply
Good spacing for extended length graphic cards (without compromising drives)
Good cooling (I can't review liquid coolers however as I'm using air coolers) especially for the HDD bay which has a fan installed directly in front of it
The bad
The High Definition Audio cable is barely long enough to clear the installed optical drive. It works but it's not pretty
The rear panel PCIe cutouts (for the graphic card/wifi card) are hard to remove. Requires a dremel with rotary disc.
Marginal
The top of the case offers 2 USB2.0 and 1 USB3.0 sockets. This should've been 2 USB 2.0 and 2 USB3.0 sockets!
There's no reset button or HDD light (but personally I think that's fine as I never use or reference either)
I read through all the negative reviews and the primary takeaway was the problem removing the rear panel cutouts. So before installing anything I attacked the case with a dremel equipped with a rotary cutting disc. This made short work of the cutouts - after which I used a high pressure hose and a magnet to remove metal filings. I strongly recommend you do this BEFORE installing any components as the risk presented by metal fragments floating around inside the case is unacceptable! However, once done, that was the last significant problem.
It would've been nice if the case had a cutout for the secondary motherboard power socket so that the cables from the power supply could be mounted on the underside of the motherboard tray.
The problem with the front audio cable wasn't severe but it means (for me) the cable has to route across the corner of the motherboard. A minor detail but one which could've been avoided with an extra 6 inches of cable.
The front of the case has a v-shape which makes the rectangular-face optical drive look... odd. Not a big issue for me but if you seriously care about "presentation" this could be an issue. I could still load DVD's without a problem and when I added the SD card reader (above the optical drive) even that issue was resolved.
So in short, a fantastic, value-for-money case that only just falls short of low-cost perfection.
| Number of USB 2.0 Ports | 2 |
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