In Win Tou Review

In Win Tou Review - Interior

Build quality is superb throughout. Obviously, there’s only so tough you can make glass so you’ll always have to be careful with that side of things but otherwise this case is rock solid. The sand-cast aluminium frame, which has a lovely rough finish, is seriously chunky, as are the wonderfully tactile milled aluminium feet and handles – another design element that has its roots in practical considerations. The handles aren’t actually quite as ergonomic as we’d like, meaning they dig into your hands a bit but this is hardly the sort of case we’d recommend carrying more than a few yards anyway.


Removing the side panels, we can see the In Win Tou has a very Spartan interior, with very little in the way of features. The single 5.25in bay is mounted at the bottom, with the drive sliding in from the front, while just three mounts are provided for your hard drives and SSDs.

These, like the rest of the motherboard tray and interior mounting section, are made from thick aluminium plates and fly in the face of the modern trend for plastic, toolless, easy mounting gadgets. You just unscrew the plate from the motherboard tray, attach your drive with proper screws and screw the plate back on. It may seem fiddly but is actually really easy, and the final minimalist effect is superb, with cables directed straight out the back of the motherboard tray.


Other features include four large cutouts for cable routing, which we found to be ample. There’s also a front mounted fan, which uses a rather ingenious mounting method. Conscious of trying to keep the innards of the case as tidy yet visible as possible In Win has the fan held against the motherboard tray by an elastic bungie (the white thing trailing in the above picture). This keeps vibration transfer to a minimum and avoids having any other structural obstructions. At the time of taking our pre-system-installation photos we hadn’t quite worked out how the fan was mounted but you can see from our later photos how it goes together.

One slight oddity is that the rear expansion plate doesn’t have a standard opening for the IO shield provided with most motherboards, so you’ll miss out on the labelling provided thereon. There’s also no hole in the motherboard tray for fitting exotic CPU coolers, so you'll have to fit the cooler before mounting the motherboard - this is a very strange omission in this day and age.


Up top is ample space to fit a full-height triple radiator or, as here, a trio of fans. While options for other fan mounts are limited, there are plenty of sizeable air gaps throughout the case that the negative pressure created by those top fans should easily provide ample airflow.

Round the back, there’s plenty of space behind the motherboard tray to route all your cables. However, there’s no allowance made for the fact that you’ll be able to see all those wires through the glass – In Win is relying on the lack of internal lighting that reaches this part of the case to make it appear reflective rather than translucent.


All told, we think In Win has largely taken the right approach with the interior of the Tou. This was never going to be a case appropriate for those that want to run five hard drives and three DVD drives - it's about style, not all out features and power. But, there’s plenty of space to build a powerful gaming system that will look pretty darn tidy right out of the box, and would only require the minimum of modding to make look fantastic.


Sadly our standard case test system fails miserably to do the case justice in this regard but even so it still manages to show the case's potential. And more importantly what it does tell us is how this case performs...