Four Unique ATX Cases Compared

Internal Construction

The main motherboard mounts traditionally into the left-hand side of the case, where a full ATX board of nearly any size will fit. The drive rack above the motherboard supports five hard drives dampened by rubber grommets, with two additional undampened bays designed to support either internal or external drives.

Themaltake includes two more of its "silent" 120 mm fans as intakes, one in front of the motherboard and the other in front of the hard drive cage. That's a total of five included fans!

The hard drive cage slides out to allow easy access to both sides of the drive, a requirement for the screw-mounted drive installation. The second 3.5" external/internal bay is blocked from use with external drives by the front panel design.

Removing the 3.5" drive bay also exposes the left-side screws securing 5.25" bay filler panels. I have no clue why Thermaltake would mess up a perfectly good screwless bay design by using screw-in filler panels...

The Mozart TX supports a Mini-ITX motherboard on the flip side, beneath a power supply support brace. It mounts forward of the back panel to allow internal access to its rear panel ports, where exiting cables can be routed through the oval hole beneath the 80mm fan grille. This odd-sounding design actually makes sense when you consider the optional front panel LCD display, as it allows a VGA cable to be routed completely inside the case.

5.25" drives are secured on this side using sliding clips, but Thermaltake added a screw to each clip to secure the right-hand side of the bay filler panels!

Screwless card clips for the main system are unlatched from the outside using pinch locks.

Inside, the card latches have small tabs to "catch" slot panels and prevent them from sliding out, plus plastic pins that align with traditional threaded holes for ultimate card-holding capability.

Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom is a Senior Staff Editor at Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews cases, cooling, memory and motherboards.