The Best Chassis for Steambox/HTPC Style Gaming Systems

Thermaltake Urban SD1

The SD1 is one of the longer chassis in our test, but like the Elite 130, it manages to keep a compact size when viewed from the front. This shape and size is ideal for putting it into your home AV setup as it doesn’t take up too much space and the long chassis design leaves lots of room for long graphics cards.

All the usual ports are easily accessible on the front panel and there’s a nice brushed aluminium finish that gives it a premium look and feel.

One of the more unique aspects of this chassis is that the motherboard tray slides out from the back. Trying to install components in a compact chassis isn’t much fun, but the SD1 allows you to easily install all your components. There’s a pair of 80mm fan in the back and a 120mm pre-installed in the front for extra cooling.

The front hard drive bays lift out, allowing for easy installation of 5.25″, 3.5″ and 2.5″ drives.

All of our components fit with easy and there is plenty of ventilation all around to help keep our components cool; I’m’ expecting great things from this chassis in our benchmarks.