Building a System

Two of the motherboard standoffs are pre-mounted in the case. They're special, with machined extensions that fit into the screw holes in your motherboard, locking it into position. Once you set your motherboard on these, every other mounting hole will be perfectly lined up with its standoff.

Cooler Master says the Storm Trooper will handle micro ATX, ATX, and XL-ATX motherboards. One problem is that there is no real standard for "XL-ATX". My ASUS Rampage III Extreme is an odd form factor that's one inch longer, front to back, than the ATX standard. As you can see from the image below, it partially covers two of the cable routing holes, but this shouldn't be a problem.

The SATA cabling is neater with the drives oriented sideways, but it would be nice to have some front-to-back airflow, too. I put all four of my drives in the lower drive cage and flipped the upper drive cage so that it blows air over the graphics cards.

With all the components installed, the inside of the case still seems roomy.

The cables from the fan controller are very long, so long that I had to bundle and zip-tie them off. Despite my worries about the relatively small space behind the motherboard, the side panel went on smoothly. The recessed area in the panel doubtless helped.

The removable 5.25" bay covers stand out a little from the front of the case, which means your installed 5.25" devices will not be flush with the remaining covers.

Powered up, the Storm Trooper's LED-lit fans show through the mesh. The LEDs aren't super bright, and look pretty much as shown below. This image shows my initial build with both 3.5" drive cages oriented front-to-back, rather than the lower cage being sideways as I finished with.

All in all, a very easy build. This is one of the advantages of a full tower case: even if you don't need the space, it's nice to have, especially if you're someone who's in and out of their computer frequently.

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