Final Thoughts
A few months ago we took a look at Rosewill’s Thor V2 case and it was a good case so when I first opened this case up I was pretty excited and expected this to be a good value case that I could recommend friends looking to build a new system, but sadly it is not. To me Rosewill sort of dropped the ball on this one.
The biggest issue I have with this case is the motherboard tray design. It is sort of recessed and there is a large “L” shape that is elevated. So if you look at the case from the back it is flipped, the “L” shape is recessed. This is to make room to route cables behind the case. While the recessed area does give you room to route cables they can only be placed (comfortably) in this area. Any thicker cable cannot be routed anywhere else on the backside of the case (example). I had thought I did myself a favor by using a CPU power extension cable. Although one is not needed with this case it does make things easier, so it use it on all installs I do. After I had my system up and built I found out that I could not close the back side panel correctly because there was not enough room for my extension cable connector (the plastic part). Another thing about the CPU extension cable hole in the case, it gets almost completely covered by your motherboard. For myself and most people I know when doing an install the motherboard is the first thing we install so unless you ran your cable already you would need to take your motherboard back out and install your power supply and run the CPU power cable, which again depending on your power supply may not fit behind the motherboard tray.
The case does have a fan controller on it, which is a nice addition, but it only supports 3 fans. There are 3 fans included with this case, but room for quite a lot more. So if you added even 1 more fan you would need to connect it to your motherboard or power supply and could not control it with all of your other fans. Also the edges of the case by the optical drives are not actually rounded as we have seen in other cases, they are folded over. This will save you from cutting yourself on the metal, but cables can still be ripped here. Finally on the hard drive trays, the handles are very flimsy, I could see myself pressing one in too hard and it breaking. I still don’t get why they made the top 3 holes on the motherboard tray not have to have standoffs, but the rest needed them?
Not all is wrong with this case though. The two easily removable fan filters on the top and front of the case allow you to easily clean the case, but also install fans. Talking about fans besides the 3 that do come included you have room for quite a few more, which means having adequate cooling in this case is not going to be an issue. The tool-less system on the hard drive trays and on the optical drives work great. Actually the tool-less system on the optical drives is one of the best that I have used.
While I really wanted to like this case, there were just too many obvious issues here. I really cannot recommend this case to someone looking to build a system or install their current system in a new case. The R5 is selling for $69.99 at my favorite online retailer. At that price there are other cases in the same price range that I would recommend over the R5. Overall ThinkComputers gives the Rosewill R5 Mid Tower a 6 out of 10 score.
Pros:
– Tool-less systems are great
– Easily Removable fan filters
– 3 fans included
Cons:
– Not adequate space behind most of the motherboard tray
– Opening for CPU power cable gets partially blocked by the motherboard
– Hard drive tray handles are flimsy
– Fan controller only supports 3 fans
