Specifications, Availability and Pricing

The outside of this ATX mid-tower chassis is covered on three sides with black plastic, either shiny or textured, and there are three sides that are made from steel and painted with a textured black finish to match the plastic wrapping the other sides. The front of the chassis offers a bezel with thick side pieces, and the entire front of the chassis in between is made up of ten removable mesh panels. The plastic then gently curves at the top and bottom as it mates up with other plastic covers. The bottom cover is shiny, and offers a built in dust filter to keep the chassis clean inside. As it wraps to the top of the chassis you run right into the front I/O panel offering USB 3.0, USB 2.0, 3.5mm audio jacks, the power and reset buttons and a dial fan controller.

As you move back on the top of the chassis, you find a utility tray and then a bunch of louvers above where fans can blow out of the top of the chassis. As for the side panels, both offer a bump in the panel. The left is to allow taller CPU coolers, and the right is to allow a bit more wiring behind the motherboard tray. In the back of the chassis you have a pair of holes with grommets for water cooling, seven expansion slots with a protective cover and the PSU mounts at the bottom.

Cooling this chassis are three fans installed by Zalman with three additional places to add one. The front of the chassis is essentially all 5.25" drive bays with 3.5"/2.5" adapters in four of them for the HDDs and SSDs along with a card reader or floppy drive. There are no options for fan mounting in the front unless you rig something up. The top of the chassis will hold a pair of 120mm fans, but only one of them is included. The back of the case has a 120mm fan as an exhaust, and the floor of the chassis offers room for another optional 120mm fan. Zalman does include a 92mm fan in the hardware, and this fan is meant to me mounted to the GPU support system inside of the case to add air flow to the CPU, GPU's or anything else you can contort the fan to point at. One of the best things about this, is even with all of the holes filled, that is five fans total, and the fan controller on the front can control up to six, so you can even add the CPU cooler to this if you would like for complete control at the spin of a dial.

Something that is going to save this Zalman chassis is that I must have heard things slightly wrong, because as I look around to buy the MS800, I am finding only two locations currently stocking these in the US, and that is Newegg.com and Fry's Electronics. Both locations are showing stock with a price of $89.99, which is a really good price. I do however recommend that you go to Newegg for this deal, as you can save yourself about $10 in shipping cost.

With this new price in mind, it still has the same competition I mentioned earlier within $50 of it, but now we bring in cases like the 400R, Phantom 410, H2, Raider and the Level 10 GTS. If I didn't make the point earlier, you can plainly see the market has a lot of strong contenders, Zalman better have brought their "A-game".