Conclusions
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Sunbeamtech Silent Storm case provides a terrific cost/benefit ratio: it is inexpensive and provides great features for the average user looking for a mid-tower case and is worried about cooling.
The highlights of this product are its three 120 mm fans with a middle fan that you can change its position and its 100% screwless mechanisms for holding daughterboards and disk drives. We have recently reviewed a case from Thermaltake (M9) where the mechanism for disk drives wasn’t 100% screwless, as you still needed to use screws to fasten the hard disk drives to the case. This doesn’t happen with this product.
On the down side we think the front door could look better (it uses a cheap plastic) and the manufacturer could have provided four hard disk drive bays instead of three, sacrificing one of the 5.25” bays – which are in excess anyway –, even though the number of hard disk drive bays is adequate for the average user. We could also criticize the lack of an eSATA port, but for a product on this price range this isn’t really an issue.
But these deficiencies are easily forgotten when we think about Silent Storm’s price tag. Costing only USD 50 at Newegg.com this is definitely a great pick. Just to put things into perspective, Thermaltake M9 costs USD 80 at this same store. Even though this case from Thermaltake uses plastic parts with better quality, it doesn’t justify paying USD 30 more for a case that has the same basic limitations from this Sunbeamtech model, comes with one less 120 mm fan and uses a mechanism for holding disk drives that isn’t really screwless.
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