NZXT M59 Mid Tower Gaming Chassis

I love the little details that went into the M59 — the mesh expansion slot covers help your aftermarket VGA cooler vent hot air, the rolled edges are a great help.  This is the first case that hasn’t gotten a single bit of my blood during the install process.  The front panel offered nice connectivity, but the headphone and microphone jacks were quite stiff — I couldn’t figure out why they were not working correctly. Then I pushed really hard and all of a sudden they worked perfectly.  The glossy plastic on the front panel area is actually holding up better than I had expected over the couple weeks I have had this case. There’s little noticeable smudging and the dust is no more apparent than on the rest of the case.

That being said, the top of the case doesn’t have a  lot of clearance — so any radiators will have to be outside mounted, and possibly plain fans, if you have an optical drive in the top bay and an oversize CPU cooler.  The motherboard punch-outs for wire management are a great idea, but the case just lacks the bit of extra space to make them really effective.  I spent hours shifting wires to the best spot, and was still only barely able to close the side panel.  The stealth drive bay looked great, but I couldn’t get my drive to work in it; it always got stuck on the door when opening or closing.  Even worse than that, you can’t use a normal drive in the top bay WITHOUT the cover. The whole front panel’s top two corners are rounded, preventing the square drive from fitting properly.

I have to admit that though the M59 has lots of great features, the execution was a bit rough, and left me wanting that  little bit of extra room or that extra bit of perfection.  Despite the little flaws though, this case is a strong performer in the budget category, and I’ve become accustomed to looking over at my own piece of stealth machinery.  The fans are reasonably quite — my CPU cooler is louder by far, and many users may never need to put more than 2 hard drives in their system (or might completely escape that problem with slimmer SATA connectors).