The Best Chassis for Steambox/HTPC Style Gaming Systems

Final Thoughts

It’s been really interesting testing out these chassis, not only because I’m excited about the world of Steambox and HTPC style gaming, but also because it’s the first time I’ve benchmarked the thermal and acoustic performance of a range of PC chassis. All of these cases are some of my personal favourites for a wide range of reasons and while some performed better than others, they’ve all held up really well in the tests.

While I’m not out to pick winners here, there’s certainly a couple of chassis that really stood out from the crowd. The Silverstone Sugo SG09 has long been one of my favourite chassis, it’s practically a Tardis in terms of how well it handles components, it looks great and it offers up exceptional cooling performance. The Thermaltake SD1 is equally impressive in terms of component capabilities, while offering good cooling and acoustic performance.

One of the real stars of the show for me is the Cooler Master Elite 130. This is a great looking chassis, its pretty compact so that it’ll fit into your AV setup and while performance wasn’t the best, it’s the cheapest chassis’ I tested, you can’t argue with the price vs performance ratio of this chassis.

The BitFenix Phenom didn’t fare as well as I had hoped in the thermal performance tests, but it was up against some fierce competition in this respect. The bonus with this chassis is that it looks stunning and so long as you put a little consideration into the cooling of your components, such as a 120mm AIO CPU cooler, you’ll be very happy with it.

The Silverstone GD05 has a lot of potential, as it’s a great looking case, comes with three high quality fans pre-installed and it’s form factor means it’s super easy to integrate into a home AV setup; it’s just a shame our graphics card didn’t fit, although it is a very long graphics card.

As I said before, this is just first phase of our Steambox coverage. Now that we’ve got some of the basics covered and you may have a chassis in mind for your build, we’ll be following up with a look at components and performance benchmarks very soon, so stay tuned for more.