The Midgard II is a great chassis, but it’s not perfect as do have a couple of minor issues with it, such as the cable management cut-outs could be slightly bigger, there is enough room in the chassis to handle this and if I were to install several hard drives in this chassis and even a dual GPU setup, I imagine things would start getting pretty cramped when I have to stuff cables through those holes. The same goes for the rear of the chassis, once cables are routed behind the back plate, I had a little trouble getting the back side panel back on the chassis, a little bit of a recess in the side panel would elevate a lot of issues here, while there are tie down spots for using cable ties everywhere I found it hard to use them properly due to the way I had to route cables through the cut-outs in the first place, this really is a minor issue though, since once everything was installed and I managed to get the back panel on it looked fine, the term out of sight out of mind applies nicely in this situation.
With that being said, it’s easy to forget that this is a low to mid range chassis, the cable management is not unlike that of similar sized chassis in this price range, so it’s not something I really feel the need to mark it down for, I’ll summarize the cable management as adequate. There are so many features packed into this case, with things like its fantastic premium styling and soft touch finish, a slick little fan controller to maximise cooling or minimise noise as your needs require, support for extra long graphics cards, up to 6 hard drives, 3 + 1 slim optical bays, USB 3.0 support, an external hard drive dock, loads of extra fan mounting points all add up to a lot for what sounds like a bargain at around £60.
Installation was relatively painless, with all the panels having a quality finish to them, more screws and bolts than I needed included and plenty of room inside meant I was able to build the system in around 30mins and strip it back down again in around 10min. Non of the panels had any squeaks or rattles to them either, even when the chassis was empty everything felt pretty solid, only further highlighting the value for money in this chassis.
So overall a really well made case that is packed full of all the features you would expect in a modern case or could require from it to house a mid to high specification gaming rig, with plenty of cooling, a great side panel window to show of your shiny components and all this within a sensible budget means I am more than happy to award the Xigmatek Midgard II our Bang for Buck award.
