Cooler Master I-Tower 930 Case review - PAGE 4

From the barebone case, piecing the case back together was rather easy but wasn't without a few bumps in the road. Especially on the first build, there were some headaches in store.

There are a few neat features on the exterior of the case. In addition to the power led and hard drive led, this is a third led. It's tagged as a messenger LED and can be used for whatever purpose you can find for it. Also for each LED on the front panel, there are plastic tubes which channel the light from the back LEDs to the front I/O panel. These channels aren't new as you might have seen them before but they are still pretty nifty.

The hot swappable rack mount was actually one of the easiest things to setup for this case. Just attach the mount to a SATA drive with four screws and slide it in. Installing the drives were painless, as they should be. The LED lights channels for each hot swappable drive also work just the same as the channels for the front LEDs. The LEDs could've easily been left out so it's good to see Cooler Master go the extra yard to include them.

One of my initial concerns with the I Tower was if it could accommodate dual slot graphic cards. However the retension clips for the expansion slots worked really well in seating the card firmly in place. To test this, I installed a crossfire set of Radeon X1800XTs without any problems and a multitude of other cards had no problems as well.

For the 5'25 bays, the flip clip is incredibly easy to use. Sliding the drive into and flip the clip's pins to lock it in place. With that said, they are just pins. With screws, the drives are secure in their placement and are sure not to move. These clips are great so long as you aren't travelling with the case since it's possible that some of the screwless features could detach with some jostling.

The biggest problem by far was the power supply compartment. Due to tight constraints, the void in which a power supply is suppose to fit through isn't big enough for some power supplies (Thermaltake Tough Power 750W being one of them). And is a good chance that passing any power supply through will result in some scuff marks on the exterior if you aren't careful. It's dissapointing to see that the cage didn't work as well as planned.

The 92mm fan, which comes included with the case, is somewhat bothersome. You can choose to attach it first and try to snake cables around it or attach it after and having some fitting issues. Also if you have a motherboard with the IDE mounted hortizonally, the fan is mounted over top so it'll take some cramped hands to adjust it now and again. Irregardless, with the fan attach, the cabling inside isn't going to be pretty without some effort.

By the far the largest cooling apparatus included with the case, the CPU tunnel will be used by just a few. The plastic casing that should fit around the your heatsink choice is only large enough for stock cooler. This is fair enough since larger heatsinks should compensate for the extra few degrees of cooling the tunnel can give. So for consumers on a budget, the tunnel will help out stock cooler become more efficient. Also attached to the apparatus is a PCI card holder which will help level sagging heavy PCI-E cards. So consider the tunnel a complimentary piece, use it if you can.

The front door comes off very with spring loaded hingles. Just press down on both ends and the door is detached. This could come in handy for some people and is something to consider.

Installation for this case ran into a couple snags with mounting the power supply and snaking cables but the rest of the case went together easily.