Bitfenix Merc Alpha Mid ATX Tower PC Chassis Review

1. Introduction
2. Specs and Packaging
3. External Impressions
4. Internal Impressions
5. Installation hands-on and Conclusion

Its best if you get 1-2 fans for the front if you plan to stack you Hard drives and use a good enough mid-end graphic cards. Shinobi’s fans also made a pretty good impression. I hope to see a set of 2 fans on retail from Bitfenix. If the cost is reasonable, these are pretty quiet fans that you can have with a 3 pin connector. Moving on- you need to use thumbscrews to secure HDD bays. As one would probably expect, the distance between 2 HDD drives on the bay is about 1 cm. You know my opinion about the PCI slot secure bracket so there’s nothing much to go on.

TX750 isn’t an ideal way of getting to know if such cases good for routing cables. Usually these are designed keeping decent enough 450-600w units. Since I don’t have any other power supply and went ahead with it.

I wasn’t able to close the right side panel because of the thickness of the 8 PIN ATX connector, but what’s really interesting is that I didn’t have this issue with the 24 pin motherboard connector since I routed through the hole between the tray and the HDD bay and then taken it through the cable management hole next to the 24 pin plug on the board. No. This cable didn’t come in the way. So that angled section is useful. But once you fill out most of the HDD slots on the case, it creates a mess near the motherboard’s Southbridge area. If you have standard side Sata cables, you’re going to end up routing the cable the same way as you did with 24 pin connector to hide away the excess cables from the left panel view. But if it had little more space on the rear then its great!

Also, there’s a space of about 2.5cms between the top panel and the border of the motherboard. You’re not going to mount a 120mm fan above the CPU cooler especially if you have cooler design like Thermaltake Big Typhoon or tower coolers with 2x 120mm fans like Noctua U12PSE2, but what’s good that if the motherboard layout is in such a way that you will need to have bit of a space between the board and the top panel. The reason I am emphasizing on this is only because for cases that cost this much, such seemingly minor stuff matters a lot.

To leave the conclusion as simple as possible as the case itself: you want a low cost case and you’re going to house nothing more than 3-4 HDD drives with a 10″-10.5″ long GPU cards and a good enough cooler? This is the best case you can get. Nearest possible competitor? Most likely Source 210 Elite that costs about Rs. 2650/- but do note that you get 1x USB 3.0 and 1x USB 2.0. I haven’t taken a look at that PC case yet, but as said above that angled cable management holes have a good enough benefit. Plus mostly on boards there are about 2-4 USB 2.0 headers.

Looking at things that way, you max out on couple of those headers and you can connect upto 4 USB devices. There’s a space of about 1/2 cm. between the USB 2.0 slots, so you have an ease of installing USB drives with thicker shell- like Corsair Voyager and 32gig Kingston DataTraveller Ultimate 3.0.

Reason I am emphaszing it? Its a low cost case so manufacturers tend to do some oversights. Its not really a con, but you can see an effort was taken to design this case as good as possible. If that PCI slot design wasn’t annoying, its a good little (for something that lets you mount an ATX form factor motherboard) case, its a good case. Too bad it doesn’t have USB 3.0, but hey you’re getting 4x USB 2.0!! NZXT should have maxed out on putting 2x USB 3.0 from the motherboard’s USB 3.0 header. If you’re looking for a low cost case with decent enough quality and maybe some minor “stuff” that sets other cases apart to some extent- this is it. This is how you make a low-cost-yet-value-for-money PC cases!!! Highly recommended.

But at the very least if Bitfenix managed a right angled HDD bays and take care of that annoying PCI design and able to remove the front panel and not the buttons with it? She gets a 5 star. For now, she deserves a set of 4 stars!

Edit (31.03.12): An oversight. Bitfenix does provide with a logo sticker that you can put it wherever you want.

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