Aerocool Masstige Mid-Tower Case Review

Final Thoughts:

I did encounter some issues with my installation. First the internal hard drive mounts. I don’t like the fact that the 80pin IDE cable and power cable face right, I would prefer them to face the other direction so I can more easily hide the cables. On some cases you can opt to go either direction with the hard drives but in this case you only get one direction. If you attempt to mount the drive in reverse the IDE and power cables will obstruct the left panel and you will not be able to close the case. This is by no means a make or break point just one that bugged me, I like my cases to look clean and tidy.

My last little problem is heat. Yes that right heat. With all the equipment I put into that case there simply are not enough fans. It would be nice if Aerocool would at least include a second 120mm fan for the front of the case. So will this affect you? Not likely most people are not going to be putting six 10,000 RPM drives and two overclocked Xeon possessors into this case. But if you do plan on putting lots of hard drives into it I would strongly recommend adding a second fan in the front just to be safe.

So that is it for the bad, now on to the good. The good news is that this case has lots of room, if you are into water cooling then add in all you want, put that dual 120mm radiator up front and you still have room for plenty of drives.

Even though I griped about not being able to use the front panel ports, the cables are more than long enough for most motherboards. I have no idea why I always get so unlucky with this. It seems every time I get a new case I try to plug in the front panel and low and behold the cables will not reach. I don’t expect many people to be affected by this as Aerocool clearly thought out the length and made sure it will reach the vast majority of motherboards.

The same can be said of the power supply location. More than once I have put my system in to a new case only to find that no mater how I do it the power supply cables just wont reach. Now you might be thinking, O well he is just using cheap power supples, not always the case though. I have had this experience with the OCZ powerstream, Antec TruePower 550w, and Sparkle power supplies before. It seems some case manufactures just don’t bother to check and see if an average power supply will reach all the points in the case. Obviously Aerocool did check because I had NO problems getting power to the CD-RW drive at the top of the case or getting power to any of the seven hard drives.

I also want to talk about the tool less drive mounts. These things are great. Once you put the adapter rails on the hard drive all you have to do is slide it into place, pop in the drive mount, turn the little knob from open to locked and your done. This made for very easy drive installation. I think that I even prefer this to some of the best drive rails systems I have used, like those from Antec.

Legit Bottom Line:

The Aerocool Masstige delivers. It delivers on price, storage capacity, features, and performance. This case is a worthy rival to the CoolerMaster Stacker that comes with a smaller footprint and smaller bill. If you need lots of space with out spending lots of green, then by all means test drive the Aerocool Masstige.