Cooler Master Gladiator 600 review

Gallery

Verdict:

This sturdy, practical case is a good budget choice, but there are cheaper options of similar quality.

Review Date: 3 Mar 2010

Price when reviewed: £49

Buy it now for: £51
(see more store prices)

Supplier: http://www.scan.co.uk

Reviewed By: Kat Orphanides

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

Cooler Master's Gladiator 600 is popular with OEM system builders thanks to its sturdy and practical design. The case comes with two built-in fans - 120mm at the front and 180mm at the top.

This provides good airflow across the motherboard. There are plenty of ventilation holes, which helps with cooling, but they lack dust filters or sound damping. This means that noise can get out and fluff and dust can get in.

The Gladiator 600 is fairly easy to build and we had no trouble routing cables to any point in the case. At the rear, seven expansion slot blanking plates are held in place with plastic clips. It's not immediately obvious how to remove these clips and it's possible to damage them by pulling on them in the wrong way.

There's plenty of space for hard disks, disc drives and memory card readers, with five 3 1/2in and five 5 1/4in bays, both of which use drive rails for easy mounting. Only the 5 1/4in bays can be used for external drives, so an extra plastic cage is provided in case you want to add an accessible 3 1/2in device. On the fascia are headers for 3.5mm headphone and mic connections, two USB ports and an eSATA port.

Our case had a few partly unfinished edges, particularly around the rear blanking plates and inside the hard disk cage. These weren't sharp enough to cut us, but we got a couple of scrapes. Although the Gladiator 600 does nothing special, it's a good value case at just under £50. However, there aren't enough extra features to make it a significant improvement on Akasa's cheaper Zen.

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