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I know, I know - it's a case review. This is supposed to be an overclocking site. What's the deal? Fair question. The deal is this - the perpetual dilemma. Build a monster overclocked PC, need to cool it. Full-towers are easy to cool because they don't get as easily jammed up with cables inside and they usually have room to mount a whole stack of fans inside. However, carting a fulltower around to LAN parties can be a non-fun situation, especially for people like me who get around solely by motorcycle. However, once you've specced out all your high-performance goodies, are you really going to stick them in some cheapo mini or mid-tower case? These are usually designed for the boring home user who doesn't know any better.

The Macase K10 is an exception, with a lot of features you would normally only expect to see in a full-tower. For example, it not only includes an 80mm case-front fan, but it has an air-filter and neat-o door mechanism to assist airflow. It has room to mount another exhaust fan in the rear of the case, next to the processor, and combines some of the internal cables together into one unit. People who are constantly in and out of their PC's will be impressed by the nice non-sharp metal edging inside and the slide-out motherboard-and-cards tray. All this in a mid-tower!

When considering full-tower cases for my dual box earlier this year, I was warned off Macase cases because of poor build quality, and ended up buying something else. Now that I've actually gotten a look at one, though, I have to wonder about the accuracy of that comment. In fact, the whole unit smacks of quality - it really is well built and there are some very nice details that show some thought has gone into the design. Let's take a more detailed look.

The thing that first draws the eye when looking at this case is the big door on the front. This conceals a removable air-filter. Here's a pic of it disassembled:

Unfortunately, Macase have followed the silly trend of putting a big "more metal than holes" grille in front of the case fan. When will case manufacturers learn that this makes the unit much louder and much less effective at cooling?! Anyway, it's easily fixed with a power-drill and a decent pair of pliers. You can see at the bottom of the door the large vent to allow air to be sucked from below the front of the case. The air-filter fits on little plastic pins over the space behind the door - it's a plastic mesh so it should last a long time and can be washed with water. Take it off your PC before washing it. :) The included fan does not have RPM monitoring - it has a 4-pin molex (hard drive) power connector, not the 3-pin motherboard one. Ahh well.

Removing the faceplate reveals one of those nice details I mentioned earlier. You can take the case front off with no annoying dangly wires etc:

This is great and I wish more case manufacturers would do it. It means you can put the faceplate out of the way somewhere while mounting drives or hacking the stupid grille out :) without being restricted in how far you can move it by, say, the LED or power-switch cords. It does have those strange flex-out metal plates over the drive bays, though - does anyone actually know what these things are for? I mean, doesn't the plastic panel perform the same function? I normally just rip them out..

As I mentioned, all metal edges are nicely curved to stop you cutting yourself. I used this case to build the Athlon system for my recent K7M review, and now I'm using it to build my next water-cooled PC, which has so far involved testing a further 2 motherboards. During all this rebuilding I've not even nicked myself - and trust me, my hands are covered in little scars from a lifetime of ripping PC's and other machines apart. I guess if you really tried, you could cut yourself - but then, maybe you're the kind of person who shouldn't be left unsupervised with a pencil.