Thermaltake Commander MS-I Snow Edition Mid-Tower Chassis Review

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxHKBCz_pN0[/youtube]

When I got this case, I was keen to see to what it had on offer as I can honestly admit; I’m a sucker for white cases, and that’s why I currently use a Level 10 GT Snow Edition, so I assumed this would be a similar affair, and while from a first glance it does look pretty snazzy, it has its good and bad points, so where should we start first?

The colour is fantastic, love it, OMG, and all that jazz, but a colour can’t redeem a chassis for its faults however. This case is a mid-tower chassis that allows ATX motherboards and large amounts of storage drives with support for long graphics cards, and these are all upsides to the Commander. Some of the downsides lead us to the way we have rated it today though, and I’m quite disappointed that this case didn’t have more.

The first would be the sheer lack of accommodation for watercooling, including all-in-one solutions from Antec and Corsair, but for a gamer, it’s no real biggy, and I have to keep reminding myself, that this is a gamer orientated case, and not an enthusiast, so I’ll try to comment on things from a gamers perspective.

Cable management clearly isn’t this cases strong point, and while they have tried to compensate with the slight bulges on the side panels, this doesn’t give the best option to the end consumer, but for the most-part, gamers aren’t too bothered about cables and just want to continue fragging away until early hours of the morning.

Some gamers may want extra storage for their whole Steam collection and this may cause problems if they have a large card, such as the GTX 580 or 7970, and these are typical cards that an extreme gamer would buy, so just be sure you do your research first before you jump straight in. Speaking of drive bays, we were a bit annoyed, much with the optical drive bays that only a couple of locking fixtures came included, and a very quick search didn’t show up any retailers stocking extras for spares, but further searching may reveal different results.

All of this aside, we do have to remember that this case is sub £50 with Scan retailing at £46.66, and while you can get similarly priced cases from other brands, such as the BitFenix Survivor CORE, Fractal Design Core 3000 and Antec 300, these are all black and don’t quite have that same style that this case has, which is still tugging on my heartstrings.

We also invite you to watch our video review of this case above, so that you can get a slightly better understanding of what it’s like to see this case from every angle, including what restrictions we have when our system is built into it and of course, what we did like about the Commander.

So now we’re left at the point where we are faced with summing it all up and telling you our honest opinion, and while it does have some problems, it’s also a very cheap case for what it is and has some good styling to boot as well. You will be hard pushed to find another white mid-tower chassis for under £50, especially from a good brand, such as Thermaltake, so with that in mind, we’re happy to award this with our “Bang For Buck Award” as it simply is a good buy for a gamer.