Thermaltake A500 Aluminium and Glass Edition Chassis Review

Final Thoughts

How Much Does it Cost?

The Thermaltake A500 Space Gray Aluminium and Tempered Glass chassis is available from today. It’s priced at £259.90 on Amazon right now, which isn’t cheap, obviously. However, it’s still a fair price for what you get, especially given the engineering and building materials used here, it’s obviously going to come at a premium. This puts it in line with the Corsair 500D SE, Cosmos C700P, Raijintek Ceous Evo, and a few others, which all play a strong aluminium and glass game around the £200-300 price point.

Overview

This chassis isn’t for everyone, as it’s quite big and pretty expensive for your typical consumer build. However, for the enthusiast market, it’s priced pretty competitively for a flagship model chassis that is packed full of stunning design features. If you want this much aluminium and custom glass, then you have to pay the price for it.

Build Quality

Thermaltake has cut no corners on the design here, well, except for the literally custom cut corners of the glass, but that’s not what I’m getting at. The thick aluminium shell of this chassis is as good as they come, and it makes the A500 incredibly strong and durable. However, it’s a major part of the aesthetics to, as aluminium catches the light and has a colour that you just won’t get from painted steel or plastic panels. The quality of the glass is as good as it gets too, and the way it follows the shape of the aluminium panels is a stylish detail that cannot be understated.

Customise, Customise, Customise!

What you get is what you get with most chassis. However, modders love to get more creative, and the A500 is dialled in to make that easier than ever. Thanks to the DMD (Dismantlable Modular Design), you’re able to blow apart the whole chassis apart from the internal framework. This means fitting a complex custom loop, or modifying, painting or changing components, couldn’t be easier.

“Enables user to freely build the system from the ground up with given modular panels, racks, brackets, and pre-design mounting arrays. No more unreachable screw corners or gaps and enjoys installation in a breeze with Dismantlable Modular Design.” – Thermaltake

Hardware Support

For a stylish and clean air cooled build without a single RGB LED in sight, the A500 would look pretty sleek and almost glamorous. Put it up proudly on display next to your monitor and it would be well suited to being in a professional environment. However, it supports massive radiators, has a robust air filter configuration, room for loads of storage, massive expansion cards, and would be just as well suited to building a £10k+ extreme gaming PC or workstation.

Should I Buy One?

At this price range, I’d feel obnoxious recommending it. This is a premium chassis for the enthusiast market, and that’s not a massive number of customers. However, you can spend much more on something from the likes of InWin or Lian Li and not get anything extra for your investment. When it comes to high-end aluminium and glass precision built chassis, it’s up there with the best of them. Highly recommended to anyone who ones something that’s simply built better than your day-to-day chassis.