Interior Design

As you would expect from this huge chassis, the interior is very spacious. The screw holes for the motherboard stands are all labeled clearly for all the supported formats on this chassis, from microATX to Extended ATX. Our standard ATX motherboard had ample space on all sides when installed and the fact that the rear portion of the chassis has been completely cut out, it makes the chassis look even roomier.

The SwordM can fit an Extended ATX motherboard and our normal ATX board looked very comfortable inside.

No worries about case ventilation, not with such a gaping hole here. Of course, you still have to close the rear door. However, once you start plugging in all the cables, there goes the idea of boosting ventillation with the open rear I/O concept.

The bottom of the chassis is meshed with ventilation holes and could easily fit another couple of 120mm cooling fans if needed. Meanwhile, thanks to the width of the chassis, the side door can pack more 120mm cooling fans without fear of interfering with taller CPU coolers. There is also more than sufficient allowance for longer graphics cards.

Yet all this is undone by a momentous design flaw. Like we had shown earlier, the top panel comes pre-installed with two 120mm cooler fans. That sounds great but the execution is flawed because the fans end up being too close to the 5.25-inch drive bay. Once we installed our optical drive into the top 5.25-inch drive bay (the preferred location for most people), we found to our dismay that the chassis top cannot be closed completely. Frankly, such a major oversight seems fairly ridiculous. It immediately rules out the top 5.25-inch drive bay that most users would select by default and while the SwordM has other 5.25-inch drive bays to compensate, it just means that if you want to utilize the chassis fully, one of the 120mm fans has to removed. The alternative is to manually reposition the two fans such that they are further back. It's just more work that could and should have been tackled in the factory.

Effectively ruling out the top 5.25-inch drive, the 120mm fan got in the way of our optical drive, or the other way round (and the drive wasn't particularly lengthy either). Whichever way, one has to be sacrificed in order to close the top of the SwordM.

Another complaint has to do with the installation of the hard drives. While the tool-free aspect is present in some form, with the screw-free rear PCI expansion slots, installing the hard drives involves quite a lot of hassle. Firstly, the hard drive cage is attached to the chassis by screws. They are not exactly thumb screws either and there are a total of four screws, two on each side. This meant that we had to open the side panel door on the other side of the chassis too, remove the two screws before we could continue with taking out the hard drive cage. Speaking of removing the drive cage, it has to be removed from internally, unlike that of its competitor. This means you might even run into having to remove cables and making room prior to removing the drive cage in a fully installed system. If you install an extended ATX motherboard, things can get complicated if there are any tall components on the board that might obstruct removing the drive cage internally.

Thermaltake uses a rather common locking mechanism to secure the expansion cards the tool-free way. The SwordM however has very solid latches that won't seem as fragile as the plastic ones that we usually find.

The hard drive installation was anything but tool-free. Unlike some chassis that we have seen recently, it's orientation is still in the traditional 'front-to-back' manner, making the removal of the hard drive cage and the connecting of cables a bit harder compared to the newer ones.

Installing the actual hard drives to the cage also involves more screws, so to characterize this chassis as tool-free would only be partly accurate. Also, unlike some hard drive cages, there are no vibration dampeners to reduce noise and the cage itself could be rather creaky, especially with a 120mm fan attached to the whole cage which somehow didn't ooze the same build quality as that of the chassis external build.

Attaching a fan to the hard drive cage, especially when it lacks any vibration dampening material may not be the best option.

Join HWZ's Telegram channel here and catch all the latest tech news!

Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.