We've seen a leader emerge from each of our five-way comparisons. But a competition between 15 cases must yield one overall winner—or so we hope. Here is how they all finish in terms of average cooling performance:

The above chart is sorted by the average of both CPU and GPU temperature, with the top three cases exhibiting similar cooling performance. The NZXT Phantom 410 did a better job of cooling the GPU area, while the SilverStone Kublai KL04 and Antec Eleven Hundred pushed more air past the CPU.

Antec’s quiet Solo II topped our noise suppression chart, but at such high temperatures that we were forced to expand the scale of our thermal performance chart. Roughly equivalent in noise suppression, the Storm Enforcer, Kublai KL04, and Phantom 410 appear to be better options for building quiet gaming systems.

Combining excellent cooling and good noise suppression, the NZXT Phantom 410 tops our comparison of temperature-to-noise.
We limited our five-way comparisons to prices between $80 and $120 because that was what it took to qualify for our round-up. Since we began, however, a few of these cases dropped below $80. So, we updated our final chart to reflect actual, current prices.

Corsair’s 300R did not impress at the manufacturer-suggested price of $80, but that price recently dropped to $65 at Directron. Cooler Master’s Storm Enforcer similarly dropped to $72 at Walmart’s online store. Normalizing those two prices at the $80 minimum causes them to drop down to 10% and 15% over-average value. Strictly following the review guidelines, NZXT’s Phantom 410 comes out on top.
Using the mid-budget gaming market as our standard, the next three cases to appear on the value chart exhibit sub-standard quality. We don't see another chassis exhibiting the quality we expected in this segment until we reach Antec’s mid-pack Eleven Hundred.
A drop to $81 at Mwave puts NZXT’s Phantom 410 into its current high-value position, though it already received our accolades for high quality. Leading the entire field in both cooling and acoustic efficiency, this lower price sees the Phantom 410 finish ahead of its competition in value as well. Market leadership is the key qualification for our highest award and honor, the Best of Tom’s Hardware recognition.

If you need a different drive configuration, require different dimensions, prefer a different style, or simply despise external bay doors (like me), then fear not. The second-place Cooler Master Storm Enforcer, SilverStone Kublai KL04, and Antec Eleven Hundred perform admirably as well and are excellent values.
- Making A Case For Performance And Value
- Building With The Antec Solo II
- Building With The Corsair 400R
- Building With The In Win Buc
- Building With The MSI Ravager
- Building With The Raidmax Seiran
- Test Setup And Benchmarks
- Temperature, Noise, And Acoustic Efficiency
- Quality And Value: The Final Five, Evaluated
- One In 15: Picking An Overall Winner
the only tiny problem at the most part i see in that is that it would be slightly harder to test thermal efficiency, since its being cooled by water, rather than air + hsf so in a wc build, the thermal ratings will be extremely close.
I have a qx-2000 case from aerocool. it's a nightmare for cable management and upgrading partsm but I like it
can toms also do an in-depth article on smaller cases?
particularly, I want a similar case as the qx-2000 but the PSU is mounted at the bottom so that adding items inside woundnt be too much of a chore.
thermaltake armor a30 looks awesome, but still has a top mounted PSU
My only complaint is that instead of the title "Gaming Cases Between $80 And $120" I would have titled the article "Overclock-able ATX Gaming/File Server Cases". I'm not sure why a gaming rig needs to be a 20" tower with room for seven drives and seven expansion slots these days. There are two large camps of gamers; those that overclock and those that don't.
For either camp, mATX is the best board to choose these days. Also, no gamer needs 2-9 external 5.25" bays unless they are also building a file server with hat swappable drives. They make file server cases for that. I think everyone appreciates lots of 3.5" and 2.5" internal bays but they should be optional and cooling and noise should always be the primary concern.
For the overclockers, these cases are sized but for those that don't intend to overclock a review of mATX cases would be a lot more what the common gamer is looking at these days. In the recent builder challenge, most of the rigs came with Core-i5 CPUs because the extra CPU power of the i7 didn't really help with the benchmarks that much. The graphics card was where all the bang for the buck in gaming is. Using that same logic, a lot of gamers are not overclocking their CPU because of the cost and hassle as well a reduced component life. More than ever I think you have have a true top tier gaming rig and not overclock anything in it.
I think CM, Antec and SilverStone are going to be pretty sadface about getting those tiny "perform admirably as well and are excellent values" words at the end instead of a big, fat award badge.
Excellent series of articles anyway. Extremely useful to have such a wide selection of cases compared. Case selection IMO tends to be one of the tougher things when putting a build together, it's usually harder to compare cases than CPUs or graphics cards.
Interesting you had the 400R and not the $115~$120 -$15 MIR Corsair 500R.
Cases must have good cable management, features, airflow, and quality -- beyond that it's a Beauty is in the Eyes of the Beholder.
Just a thought on your grid you might want to add e.g. 1. Front Ports, 2. Side Panel Cable Management, 3. USB 3.0 (20-pin/pass-through)
Without adding that restriction, Tom's Hardware would have gotten at least twice as many cases at just one per manufacturer, and four times as many cases with this series' "twofer" plan.
As a motherboard editor, I can't recommend anything that doesn't have 20-pin. So as a case editor, I can't recommend anything that doesn't support recommended motherboards. Yeh, I'm a little...well anyway, you did know that without this editor we might still be waiting for a front-panel connector standard, right?
Many of the Corsair lines need a 'Version 1.1' with standardized USB 3.0 20 pins, Front Ports, and the 800D with SATA3.
Anyway thanks again
The H100 alone is why I bought this case over others. Although it doesn't take the overall win, I'm very glad to see it gets the 2012 approval. Makes me feel like I did good on my purchase.