Gigabyte 3D Aurora 570

Conclusions

Gigabyte has clearly got its design head screwed on straight - we really liked this case for all the reasons you can see. We found that assembling a system inside it was an absolutely sweet experience, with very little to cause us any kind of headache at all. Cabling and cooling a more complex system would not be very difficult inside this.

We ran some tests with our super-hot Pentium 4 rig and found, unsurprisingly, that keeping it cool was not going to be a problem for this system - with the three 120mm fans and the amount of space available, cooling was both efficient and, with the aid of some motherboard fan-monitoring, quiet.

The case is clearly spacious, but this does translate into external bulk - so if you don't have a massive space to put your rig in, you're going to find this system a challenge. Many people will no doubt find it more practicable to stick with a mid-tower - maybe something like the venerable CoolerMaster Wave Master.

However, those requiring room and sophistication will find the Aurora 570 a good home for their wares.

Value: There's just one problem - pricing and availability. At the moment, the case is only available in the UK from Komplett, which is selling it for £120. This is very expensive, given that Scan has the original Aurora - which is the same in almost every respect except for a couple of cosmetic differences - for a stunningly good £82. Given the minor differences, we have some queries about the difference in price - namely, why so?

In the States, things are a little better, with ZipZoomFly doing the Aurora 570 for a far more reasonable $144, which is a great price for the case.

All in all, the Aurora 570 is clearly a great chassis with massive potential for those looking for a system with some space. But at the current price, it's prohibitively expensive given the relative value of its slightly older brother - we'd say to go with that until the pricing on the current model comes down.