SuperMicro Gaming S5 Special Edition Chassis Review

Complete System

Total build time on the S5 was a breezy 20 minutes, everything fitted into place easily enough and as you can see, the cable routing looks tidy enough. As I expected, the small cable routing holes proved tricky for the 24-pin connectors, but it’s not like you’re going to be passing those cables through every day and when it comes to getting cables out-of-the-way, they’ve done their job.

The tool free drive bays are easy enough to work for and installing or removing a drive is a very easy task overall; good news for those who have the task of installing the maximum of ten hard drives in this chassis.

The hard drive bays can be removed is needed, but I didn’t need to as the dedicated 2.5″ bay already gives enough clearance for our rather large Sapphire R9 270X graphics card and its oversized cooler. Of course, you may need to remove the bottom drive bays if you’re using a multi-GPU setup with similar sized cards to the one I’ve used, but that’s a problem easily solved thanks to the drive bays thumb screw mounts.

The grommets are a little tight or the cables, but they’re located all around the motherboard, so it’s easy enough to put them to good use and help keep your build neat and tidy as well as keeping cables from obstructing airflow.

As I said before, there’s lots of clearance above the motherboard for extra cooling should you need it and there’s an extra pair of routing grommets for motherboard and fan cables.

All panels back in place and you can just about make out our CPU cooler and GPU through those lovely side panel vents.

Overall, this is a really nice looking build and it’ll look at home in virtually any environment, from the office to your gaming room.