Roundup: Four Gaming Cases Under $150

Inside The Storm Sniper

Though the Sniper stands at a full-tower 21.75” height, it’s built on a 19” mid-tower chassis. Users who argue for the superior internal capacity of full towers certainly can’t use this bulked-up mid-tower as an example, even though it is rather spacious by mid-tower standards. With 13.38” between the expansion slots and drive cages, there’s even room for a 13”-wide extended ATX motherboard.

A hole behind the CPU area allows cooler plates to be installed and removed easily. Other holes allow cable ingress and egress from behind the motherboard panel.

With 1.75” between the motherboard and top panel, there’s simply too little space to add a standard 1.3” thick radiator and 1” cooling fans internally, especially with crowded “high end” motherboards that use the last 0.5” of space for heat pipe sinks. Scaling back to a low-capacity, 1”-slim radiator could solve the problem for some users, but only if the top-.25” of their motherboards is obstruction-free. The fans could alternatively be stuffed into the gap between the top of the metal chassis and plastic lid, but the destructive modification of the plastic lid would be required to place the second (rear) fan there.

Liquid-cooling aspirations aside, the Storm Sniper still has several other thoughtful features to consider, such as Cooler Master’s inclusion of two standoffs with raised edges that accurately center a motherboard.

Thoughtful features continue with easy-to-use card latches that work with every graphics card we could find in the lab.

Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom is a Senior Staff Editor at Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews cases, cooling, memory and motherboards.
  • skora
    Good article. But I'm a little surprised that the Element actually found the Buy award. Usually seems like that's set aside for superior products that don't have the QC issues this did.

    I'm sure there will be request for this case and that and across a lot of price ranges.

    If you do enough of these, you could do a "Best Gaming Case for the Money" series. Or is that peeing in Don's yard?
    Reply
  • sarsoft
    No Antec Nine Hundred case...
    Reply
  • p1n3apqlexpr3ss
    That wouldnt be a bad idea tbh skora, would like to know what the best budget case is out there... not excactly a fan of the antec 200/300
    Reply
  • 4ILY45
    No CM 690 II??
    Reply
  • bk641
    the cm doesn't have a fan control option, afaik.
    Reply
  • Gosh, that Zalman is butt-ugly.
    Reply
  • zoemayne
    ANTEC 902?
    Reply
  • sarsoft
    More cases need to be added. There are other case under $150 that are better choices.
    Reply
  • bk641
    the lancool (lian-li) k62 is a very, very good case for a sub $100 range. i'm using one, and it has pretty much everything you'd want in a mid-tower case. i especially like its HDD bay system, which can be configured to have the hard drives straight on, or perpendicular. in addition to that there are four quiet fans (two on top) and room for two 5870s.
    Reply
  • Crashman
    sarsoftNo Antec Nine Hundred case...No OLD cases. The Cooler Master case ended up in here by mistake, it was supposed to be for stuff released from November onward.
    Reply