Thermaltake A31 Chassis Review

The A31 came as somewhat of a surprise to me, when I first saw it at CES earlier this year I was under the impression that it was a cheaper model than what I have here, I gave it a quick photo, thought it looked nice and moved along to the next item. Yet what we have here isn’t a budget model at around £70-90 is certainly getting into the more enthusiast or hardcore gamer side of the PC component market.

For that kind of money one expects a much higher build quality that with most chassis, everyone wants a quality return for their investment and its not exactly what I would call cheap. Fortunately the chassis is built flawlessly and while it does incorporate a lot of plastics into its design they’re nicely finished, textured, and the subtle touches of blue on the front panels really gives it a unique style.

Add to that the powder black paint job on the interior and exterior, the little details put into the front I/O panel such as the stylish power button, all these little things add up to something big. Overall this is a throughly well designed and executed product that goes a long way to justifying the price tag, I’ll even go as far as saying its great value for money.

There are a couple of minor issues however, there are only two USB 3.0 ports on the front panel and the inclusion of 2 x USB 2.0 would have also been nice as it’s quite a limited choice as it is. Secondly the front panel is dust filtered but I expect that if you have a dusty environment or keep your system on a carpeted floor, it would be a bit annoying to get that panel clean again. Yet these are minor issues and ones that in my opinion are easily overlooked by most users thanks to the style, build quality, feature list and more.

However, I’m not going to give it our editors choice award, for that I would have wanted to see more extensive water cooling support in the top section of the chassis, since as it is, its a little shallow in that area. More USB ports and a better front air filter.

However its more than worthy of our just as prestigious Gamers Choice Award because any gaming rig is going to look fantastic encased in this chassis. For the money, you can fit a great amount of storage and still have a multi-GPU setup and many other high end components. If you need a high-spec gaming rig, but you don’t have the money left over for a premium chassis (£100+) then this is the next best thing.