CM Storm Trooper - Gaming Full Tower Computer Case with Handle and External 2.5" Drive Dock with Side Panel Window

Pros: **A LOT of space to house your parts... did i mention A LOT of space? this is really the biggest asset in my book, it was a dream not fighting the inside trying to route cables or cut up my knuckles trying to plug in some small fan header.
**Significant cutouts covered by rubber grommets to route cabling. Hiding your cables will NOT be a problem here.
**Comes as "side mount" hard drive bays but can change to front mount (I did).
**Includes a 2.5" SATA front bay, convenient when trying to recover or move data off a 2.5" drive.
**Adjustable fan speed button mounted near power button.
**Removable/washable fan filters.
**"Bad boy" (200MM) top fan can be replaced w/ two 120MM fans if desired.
**Rear exhaust fan mount accepts 120 OR 140 MM fans.
**Comes with a nifty little "tool drawer" (size of a 5.25" bay) which can hold parts or adapters etc.
**Rubber grip handle on the top, this was a must for me, I was tired of lugging my rig on a wheeled cart.
**(2) front USB 2.0 and (2) front USB 3.0
**This case really does look great, sleek black, red LED accents, huge window. I also added more red LED's and LED fans.
**Power Supply can be mounted right side or upside down, convenient if you want to have the cables coming into your PS facing the opposite side, I mounted mine upside down for this reason (this was an unexpected perk).
**Many thumbscrews over conventional Phillips head screws.

Cons: **Case may be too big for some, not a con for me.
**Side/Front mount HDD bays only allow for the LED fans to mount in the same direction. That means if you install drives on the side, fans are on the side, if you install on the front, then fans are on the front.
**Rear and top fans are not LED, easily correctable.

Overall Review: Coming off of a 6 year old Antec 900 case, this case is HUGE! I thought too big when I unboxed it but now that it's sitting on my desk, it looks great and it was nice to have all the room inside while putting it together.
Expect to spend about two hours putting your rig inside this thing and most WILL need to instruction book for some reference, for example the fan wiring and how to adjust the drive bays to front mount. I've been building my own PC for two decades now and I did need to check the manual for a couple of points.

The cons listed are personal preference so for me it was not a problem and thus I rate this case w/ 5 eggs. It really is superior to my ol' Antec 900 in every way.

Within the past year or two, I've been buying more Cooler Master products, specifically due to reliability. They've always made good stuff, but they've really stepped up their game in the enthusiast market. Now whenever I look for accessories, my first stop is Cooler Master and Logitech.

Pros: External 2.5" swap-out bay. Fan/lighting control. accessibility of front panel connections. The carry handle is wonderful. You'd think having a carry handle on a FULL TOWER would be fairly useless, but these towers tend to be stored on the floor, but you work with them on a table. bravo! I say. The front vents are unusually secure despite being tool-less. Just beneath the vents is a storage compartment that natively stores ALL of the fasteners that come with the case with the exception of the 3.5"-to-2.5" caddies (see cons for the discussion of availabe space inside).

Cons: Modular internal design -- You'd think this would be a big advantage, but it isn't. In fact, the 3.5" cages are more trouble than they're worth. The default configuration necessitates that you remove both side panels just to install internal drives. There's a separate 2.5" drive caddy that you need to remove from the frame in order to install 2.5" drives. Both of these "features" make the case unusually cumbersome given its size.

This is a fairly complex case design for the sparse instructions that are included. the ONLY instruction is visual. clearly, CM cut corners by avoiding translators.

Quality control. The case came with a socket to screw the motherboard risers into the case. Yeah. That didn't work. The socket fit just fine, but the holes were too small! I tried every hole. I even tried some spare risers I had lying around. It was the holes not the risers. I eventually resorted to using a drill with the socket to force the risers through the holes in the case. They are in, and they're secure. But that was ridiculous. I'm not sure if it was the holes themselves or the paint (as some of the threading on the risers was stripped off, I think it was just that the holes were too small).

Overall Review: Here's my setup:
ASUS TUF Z270 Mark 2 LGA1151 DDR4 HDMI DVI M.2 USB 3.1 Z270 ATX Motherboard
G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series 32GB (4 x 8GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 3400 (PC4 27200)
Intel Core i7-7700K Kaby Lake Quad-Core 4.2 GHz LGA 1151 91W BX80677I77700K
EVGA 750 GQ 210-GQ-0750-V1 80+ GOLD 750W Semi Modular EVGA
MSI GeForce GTX 1070 DirectX 12 GTX 1070 ARMOR 8G 8GB 256-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16
There's also a Corsair 280mm CPU cooler at the top of the case (inside)
WD Black 256GB Performance SSD - M.2 2280 PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive
1x 2.5" sata drive.
rosewill USB/eSATA front panel (5.25")
BD burner in another 5.25" slot

So that's a full set of RAM banks, a LARGE gfx card, a LARGE LQ radiator/fan assemble & hoses. Nothing else is out of the ordinary. The case is PACKED. I don't even have any 3.5" drives installed, and there's no room to route cables. The 2.5" internal cage pushes right up next to the PSU so that you have to take it off to get at the "modular" PSU slots.

For some asinine reason, CM thought it was a good idea to leave the default 3.5" internal cage orientation so that the fans are on the "business" side of the case (as opposed to the back side that the mb screws into). That means pulling the cage out and unhooking everything every time you want to add/service something in the cage. As a bare minimum, users should reverse that orientation to make the 3.5" drive bays more accessible. I turned them 90 degrees so that the fans were in the more traditional orientation blowing into the cage from the front to the back of the case. Remember, my cage is empty, so I'm using those fans exclusively to move air through the case. The reason I did this, however, was to give me room to shove cables around the gfx card.

This case is gimmicky. It's cool. It's also disappointing. There's too much interior space lost to drive cage placement. The toolbox storage case also contributes to this, but that's not something that actually bothered me the way the placement of the drive cages (both 2.5" and 3.5") did.