Roundup: Four Gaming Cases Under $150
Building With The Element V
The Element V’s installation kit is far more basic than many of its competitors, since most of the case’s adapters and fans are pre-installed. Thermaltake adds a 3.5” external bay adapter and cover panel, a PC speaker, and two plastic grommets for use in place of the knock-outs with external liquid-cooling hoses.
The Element V is cavernous, swallowing up full-sized PC components with ease. Because standard-screw mounts are used throughout the case, the only other noticeable exception from normal PC builds is that the front-panel cables are too long. Specifically, running the front-panel cables around the bottom of the motherboard to its farthest corner still results in eight inches of slack that need to be tucked away behind the tray or drive cages. However, we’ll try not to criticize that feature too much, as it's better to have too much cable than not enough.
Lighting modes for the three LED-equipped fans include blue, green, and red as well as two alternating-color patterns. A sixth LED mode disables lighting entirely.
One more thing we should mention is that the side-fan contacts on our particular sample were slightly misaligned, so that we had to bump the bottom corner of the side panel rather hard to turn the fan on. Moving the case caused the panel to shift, and we had to bump the panel once again for the fan to work. This is especially troublesome, since the connectors are not adjustable.
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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.Reply
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? -
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 200/300Reply -
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