After a few days research I decided on the Cheiftec BA-01BBB Bravo full tower

 

 

It was roughly the size as my Dragon, just a little bigger; it had all the easy fittings features I wanted. I searched all around for somewhere that had stock of it but all the familiar places I buy from either didn't stock it or they didn't have them in stock. I headed over to Cheiftecs website and sent off an email asking for official UK suppliers, an hour later I received an email from Dave at Sagemaster.

Sagemaster are one of Cheiftecs official UK suppliers and their website is dedicated to all Cheiftecs products and accessories.

 

 

 

 

Like all cases now it comes with X2 front USB, X1 firewire, Mic-in and line out on the front of the case

The front panels are removable, I'm not sure why as I can't find anywhere that has coloured replacements but it did come in handy (more on that later on in the article)

My main priority was cooling, having three hard drives, 6600GT and a AMD 64 3000+ 2GHz @ 2.3GHz

The case comes with a good cooling setup straight out of the box

On the far side is a three 92mm fan holder to cool the hard drives, at the rear above and below the PSU there are two 120mm fan holes and on the side there are two 92mm fan holes blowing onto the CPU and graphics card

There is plenty of room inside for everything you need and in my opinion is perfect for water cooling

The first thing I did when I got the case was to cut the grills off of the three 92mm fan holder to allow for better air flow, I also drilled holes into it to allow for the mounting of 80's instead of 92's

The hard drive cooling is designed (I believe) to pull air from the un-fanned meshed side across the hard drives and blown out the other by the fans.You can have the fans blowing in. I have tested both ways and have found no difference in the hard drive temps.

The first and only problem I ran into was the front door wouldn't shut with my fan controller in, this was easy to solve. I removed the front panel of the door and cut a rectangle in the back plastic mesh.

Not the neatest of jobs but I have since tidied it up, at least now I can shut the door with the fan controllers switches in any position.

After a few hours stripping the kit out of my old case and into the new one, cleaning as I went, all went in and the pc booted first time.

As you can see from the picture above there is plenty of room left, I have another AC Ryan 120mm BlackFire 4 fan on the way and some new AC Ryan SATA cables that have one end at 90 degree angle as normal SATA cables are a tight fit, pushing against the side of the case.

As soon as I got the case I started thinking about windowing the side panel and having seen the pre-windowed side panels made by Cheiftec I decided that it would be better than anything I could do.

Cheiftec have designed this side panel so that the window is removable.

 

The side panel was ordered from Overclock.

The panel has just one 92mm fan opening, which seems to be located in an odd place and not really cooling anything. It's a screwless mounting which I had trouble getting the fan into and it took several minutes of messing around for it to finally clip on.

I also ordered the wheels for the case as on it's own it is very heavy and once I had all the parts inside it got even heavier, with the wheels it will make moving it around easier.

The wheels were pretty simple to fit, undo the screws holding the feet and screw the wheels on using the pre-drilled screw holes.

I'm very impressed with the final results, I still have a few things that I want to change but they can wait until a rainy day. Overall I'm very impressed with the case and the accessories available for it and the only let down was the odd position of the fan on the window and the trouble mounting it.

I have to give the Cheiftec Bravo 9 out 10; it loses a point due to the windows fan mounting.