Cooler Master I-Tower 930 Case review - PAGE 5

The Cooler Master I Tower 930 case is definitely an admirable and ambitious product. Cooler Master's latest forray into case design has brought us a few unique features which you won't be able to find with any other case in its price range. Most notably, the SATA II rack and plane are the biggest innovations with this case, offering hot swappable capibilities with a consumer brand case. The functionality of the SATA II hot swappable drives is very intuitive and take no prior experience for a user to be able to use it. Don't forget also that NVIDIA's Nforce 5 series of motherboards has some very very intuitive and easy to use SATA RAID capabilities that are just screaming for a hot swappable case.  I for one will not be surprised to see other companies use a similiar rack mount design as Cooler Master's in the future.

One thing which bugs me about this case however is the placement of the I/O panel. Mostly in part to the fact that Cooler Master tried to fit everything possible into this case, they didn't have much choice with the placement of the I/O panel. A 5'25 bay would have had to given up to place the I/O panel at the top where it would be out of the way, which I'm guessing Cooler Master thought wasn't feasible. So as it stands now, there is a added risk of leaving anything sticking out of the I/O panel, in fear of the door possibly damaging any peripherals when opened.

The other features of the I Tower 930 are hit and miss. The retension clips worked surprisingly as they should. Expansion cards can be insert within seconds and are able to commodate even the largest cards without compatiability issues. All six of the 5'25 bays can be fitted with optical drives within seconds as well with a quick flip of a switch. However the power supply cage doesn't work quite as expected, proving to be one of the more difficult parts to get around during installation. The CPU tunnel, while very effective if used, will be largely ignored by most owners as it can only be used with smaller (stock) heatsinks and the 92mm fan mount might cause from cable snaking problems. However these issues aren't detrimental to the overall usage of this case.

The I Tower 930 maintains Cooler Master's status as innovators of case design. What it really comes down to is if you have some usage for the hot swappable functionality, this is probably the case for you. And if you don't have a need for it, you still won't be dissapointed with what else the case has to offer.