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.
