Deepcool Steam Castle Review

Interior

The Steam Castle's front and roof panels pull off easily and cleanly, though you'll need to disconnect the LEDs from the control panel to fully remove the roof. A minor irritation is that the side panels lack handles. It's also possible to remove the bottom panel, but you need to peel off three of the four rubber feet to access the screws that hold it in place – we nearly broke it before we reaised this.


Inside is where the similarities with the Aerocool Dead Silence are most obvious, as the internal design is identical, so the two companies are using the same OEM manufacturer. The interior is divided into two sections, with space for the motherboard in the main top one and room for the PSU, drives and cables in the smaller section below. The design makes sense from a thermal standpoint – the PSU will be cooled by its own fan, and the drives will receive at least some airflow from the front 200mm fan, while the majority of it is funnelled virtually unobstructed towards the CPU and GPU.

The motherboard tray comes with pre-installed mounts and sits horizontally in the chassis. The main area is so large as to allow room for CPU coolers up to 200mm in height, and graphics cards can stretch to 320mm too, though you may need to remove the front 3.5-inch bay and possibly even the 5.25-inch bay (both are held in place with screws) depending on how tall your card is and where the power connectors are situated. Of these front drive bays, only the 5.25-inch one is externally accessible, though the 3.5-inch one has mounts for 2.5-inch drives too.


In the lower section we find the PSU mounting area. Note that as with the Dead Silence there's a fairly tight constraint on how long PSUs can be, as the internal wall that limits the length is non-removable. You have about 190mm to play with, but that has to include the cables protruding from the PSU too, so really the limit is closer to 160mm. There is at least a set of four rubber spikes upon which it can rest, however.

In front of the PSU area is a drive cage that can house two 3.5-inch or two 2.5-inch drives using the slide out plastic trays. These are a little weak and flimsy but they do the job well enough, pulling apart and closing in again to lock in larger drives with metal pins that are surrounded by anti-vibration rubber. There's also a second drive cage (again fully removable) at the rear of the case which supports 2.5-inch drives only. For these, you'll need to screw in a set of rubber wheels and roll the drives into position, where a plastic arm will automatically lock them in place.


One thing we like about the Dead Silence, and thus which we also like about the Steam Castle, is the potential water-cooling support. In the roof, for example, provided you're able to live without the two top drive bays, you can install 240mm or even 280mm radiators with no thickness limitations until you reach your graphics card. Also, since you can remove the outer wall and roof of the front 3.5-inch hard drive bay, you could install a 180mm radiator in the front mount, again with no thickness limitation until you reach the edge of your graphics card (or the PSU wall).


Only some of the internal cables are properly shielded in black, which is a shame as there is quite a lot of them and also a side panel window. That said, the LEDs and the triple-fan fan controller are all powered by a single SATA connection. Even so, cable management in this chassis is not the easiest of things, especially if you're contending with a lot of power cables. There is a fair bit of space to stash them all in the lower section, but the position of the side I/O connectors on the side panel means it can be difficult to replace without the panel showing a slight bulge.