What many of you might know have picked up on as yet, is that Cooler Master is set to launch a new range of products for gamers under the CM Storm brand. The first product has now turned up for pre-order on a German Website called Caseking.de.
As you might have guessed, we're talking about a case here and it's called the Sniper. It's been developed in parallel by a different team at Cooler Master and it shows. Although it's easy to see that some of the inspiration is coming from Antec, while other parts have never been seen before.
It's a fairly big steel and plastic case with five 5.25-inch drive bays (of which one will take a 3.5-inch drive) and five internal 3.5-inch drive bays. It's got a bottom-mounted PSU and it comes with a top-mounted 230mm fan, front and side-mounted 200mm fans, as well as a rear-mounted 120mm fan. At the front top of the case is a built-in fan controller which has a button in the middle of it that allows you to switch off the LEDs that are built into the fans, which is a pretty neat feature.
As Cooler Master is targeting gamers with this case, it also has a new feature never before seen. It's a simple cable lock, which consists of a vertical add-on card slot and a rear bracket with little cut-outs in it. This allows you to put your mouse and keyboard cables through the cut-outs in the bracket and by installing the bracket into the slot, you've secured your peripherals to the case. The slot can, of course, be used with anything else, such as extra USB ports or whatever kind of bracket your motherboard comes with, which could be handy if you've used up your other expansion slots.
Next to the fan controller knob you'll also find an oversized power button, four USB 2.0 ports, one FireWire port, one eSATA port and a mic and a headphone jack. All the drive bays and expansion card slots are also tool-less to make it easy to install your gear in the Sniper.
The downside? Well, the planned retail price got a bit higher than what we were told a while back, so you're looking at €149.95 including 19% VAT in Germany.
You can pre-order the case here and you can also watch an interview there by Kode 5 with David J from Cooler Master; and there's a short introduction video to the Sniper case, plus some additional pictures of the case itself.
