CM Storm Scout 2 review

CM Storm Scout 2 - Interior

Unscrew a couple of thumbscrews on each side panel and you're in to the Scout 2. Despite it only being a midi-case, it doesn't feel cramped inside, but rather spacious where it counts and tidy too. The build quality on the inside matches that of the exterior too, as everything is well constructed and there are no sharp edges. The only exception to this is the plastic clips for locking optical drives into place, which were a bit loose and rattly.


The cutout on the CPU area of the motherboard tray is well-sized and should help with the installation of larger coolers and their backplates. The motherboard mounts do not come pre-mounted, but the thumb screws on the PCI expansion plates are a welcome addition and the pre-routed fan and front panel cables are a very nice touch too.

In fact, cable management is one of the Scout 2's strongest points, which is excellent news given that the original Scout had few options for tidying away stray PSU and system cables. The three holes covered by very secure rubber grommets enabled us to tuck masses of cabling into the area behind the motherboard, which is super spacious thanks to the dented shape of the right side panel. Plenty of zip ties are provided for finishing up the job, with the end result being an extremely tidy system with every cable safely out of the way.


Fitting your hardware into the Scout 2 is a straightforward process, with no silly design flaws that need to be worked around. The locking mechanism for optical drives, though a bit flimsy, does work well enough for those who still use them. However, you'll need to bend some plastic out of place behind the optical drive covers in order to free them, which isn't the most elegant of solutions.

While floppy disk drives are all but a distant relic now, external 3.5in bays can still be useful for fan controllers, for example, so it's a shame that not even one 5.25in to 3.5in adaptor is provided with the Scout 2, particularly when you consider that the case doesn't feature any fan control features of its own.


Tool free rails that we've seen plenty of times before are provided for installing 3.5in hard drives into any of the seven drive bays. You can remove the left wall of the four middle bays to make room for longer graphics cards, although we were just able to fit our Radeon HD 5870 2GB without having to do so, and left it in for testing since there is no front intake airflow for it to block anyway. It's rather strange that you can only remove one side of the drive bays, rather than the whole four bays as a single unit. Just a single 3.5in to 2.5in adaptor is included with the Scout 2, limiting you to two SSDs, which is somewhat less than we're used to seeing these days.