Thermaltake The Tower 200 Snow Mini Case Review

How Much Does it Cost?

The Thermaltake The Tower 200 Snow Mini Chassis Tempered Glass PC Gaming Case is available now at Scan Computers for a very reasonable £109.99. That’s not cheap, but for such a premium and unique PC case, it’s really a fair price and has a lot to offer to high-end PC builders wanting something unique in the mini-ITX market. Plus, if you wanted to go all-out, there’s the ThermalTake LCD Panel Kit for Tower 200 Snow, which is another £99.99 that you can add to the front of the case.

Overview

I said three years ago that the Tower was one of my all-time favourite PC cases. It was just so unique and interesting. Sure, it got a few jokes for looking like a popcorn dispenser or a toy grabber machine, but honestly, I’m pretty OK with that, that’s fun, isn’t it!? This one is much the same, it looks like a china cabinet or something, but if that’s what it takes to show off your sexy new PC hardware, then why not!

Thermaltake built the old model for mini-ITX gaming, and typically that means smaller GPUs, less powerful hardware to deal with the limitations in cooling that are on offer, and what did the community do? Crammed in extreme hardware regardless then pulled a shocked face when everything got hot. Alas, Thermaltake just makes their small case bigger this time, and while that comes at the cost of the left and right side panel windows, having a larger front panel window and full mesh on each side is certainly an upgrade, not a downgrade.

There are a lot of little improvements here really, and they all add up to make this a premium case experience. There are more dust filters on this case than, well, actually any other case I can think of. There are two on the left, two on the right, two on the front, one on the bottom, one on the top, and one in the back… All intakes/outtakes are filtered, so regardless of how you configure your fans or where, it’s all kept clean, which is awesome.

The cable routing is superb, with room under the PSU shroud, this case can handle a surprisingly large PSU of up to 220mm, with room to spare for cables. Then behind the motherboard, there’s about a 1″ deep section with cable clips and routing holes to deal with a significant number of cables with ease. It actually puts cases many times its size to shame in this regard, very impressive.

Thermaltake also massively increased the fan support, not just the airflow, and there are now two of their lovely CT140mm fans installed as standard, but also room for a 280mm radiator on the right side, which means that you can cool a high-performance CPU much easier than you could in the Tower 100. Plus, even if you went for air cooling, the larger case design means that a big tower air cooler shouldn’t be an issue either.

Should I Buy One?

There aren’t many PC cases out there that look anything like the Tower 200, and while it is quite large for a mini-ITX case, the size is largely vertical to allow for extra-long graphics cards to be supported. However, it retains a pleasantly small footprint, making it easy to accommodate on, under or alongside your desk. The Tower 100 was a huge hit for Thermaltake, and the 200 is a fantastic upgrade, for existing 100 owners or new system builders alike; highly recommended!