Final Thoughts
All in all Zalman has a good case on their hands with the MS800. It is pretty large and has a great look to it. Being that big not only means you have a lot of room inside to work with, but it also means you can install longer video cards and quite a lot of other hardware as well.
The fact that you can use all 10 bays as optical bays is pretty cool, but I’m not sure how practical it is. Not that many people use more than two optical drives and most people I know who are building a new system do not even install optical drives. There are only 4 spots for hard drives and that seems a little limited for such a small case. I honestly would have much rather have seen dedicated hard drive cages with trays. They not only would have made hard drive installation easier, but if positioned differently Zalman could have had room for an intake fan. Since there is no true intake fan your hard drives could potentially get pretty hot.
When it came to installation everything went pretty well and the only real issue I had was with wiring on the opposite side of the motherboard tray. Zalman’s design here works, but in order for you to tie down your cables you need many more cables than what are provided. In addition you would have to route and tie down each cable individually, which is going to take quite a while.
While this case is not considerably bad, it is not a case that really blew our socks off either. With a price of $89.99 I do believe you are getting what you paid for and it is one of the better cases at that price point. Overall ThinkComputers gives the Zalman MS800 Mid Tower Case an 8 out of 10 score.
Pros:
– Sleek design
– A lot of room inside
– VGA retention bar
– USB 3.0 support
– Can install a lot of optical drives
Cons:
– Can only install 4 hard drives
– No true intake fan
– No enough cable ties included to tie everything down
– Cabling is going to take quite a while to do it correctly
