Rated 4 out of 5 by 1
reviewer.
Rated 4 out of 5 by paulc Robust value, but a touch rough.
The CG-4U-500 case represents a lot of metal for your money. It is made of decent thickness steel and comes with a good selection of fixings to allow you to attach the motherboard and various accessories inside it.There is no PSU, but that suited us perfectly as we wanted to install a high-reliability one and not the usual cheap things that come with basic cases.
For cooling it has a crude air filter on the hinge-down front panel which helps keep dust and fluff out of the insides. It comes with a 120mm fan on the front blowing through the main HDD support area, and a smaller on on the rear to help extract air. We replaced the front fan (cheap, powered from 12V molex connector like old-style HDD) with one of the BeQuiet fans that are powered from the motherboard header (that way we can remotely check the fan speed for failure), and also removed the rear fan as our application was fairly low power and we wanted better access to the motherboard.
Build quality is OK, but there are two issues we don't like about them:
Firstly there is a lack of support under the front-right corner of most motherboards. For some reason the platform that you screw the support spacers in has nothing there! We ended up using a 16mm self-adhesive support (e.g. RS 721-4710) for strain relief because that area is often where the main power connector for the motherboard is located.
Secondly the handles are square with sharp edges! Given the weight of this chassis alone this is a major annoyance. Occasionally we resort to taking a file to round the edges of the handles!
Overall though it is excellent value for money so the minor problems can be lived with.
09 September 2014
- 2016-05-20
- bvseo-cps-pl-PRR