Moneual MonCaso 972 review

At £329, you’d be justified in expecting a lot from a case. Moneaul’s MonCaso 972 HTPC chassis is as polished, well made and feature packed as it is expensive.

The case has a built-in 7in 1,024×768 LCD touchscreen, which can be connected to a spare VGA output on your graphics card. It’s designed to provide an interface to browse your media without having to turn on your TV or projector – perfect for music. A built-in memory card reader can handle most formats except xD, and the case even comes with a Media Center remote control.

We were a little less impressed by the internal layout of the aluminium case. Although there’s plenty of room for a full ATX motherboard and any components short of the very tallest CPU coolers, the case was cluttered with cables, not only from our power supply but also from extra buttons and screen at the front.

The case comes with two 80mm fans at the back and space for another two just behind its twin 3.5mm drive cages. Despite the lack of substantial cooling, it doesn’t get too warm, but was a tad noisy – there’s no sound insulation, but there are plenty of dust filters. There’s enough room for four internal 3 1/2in drives and one external 5 1/4in.

Moneaul’s 972 is a large, well made and feature-packed HTPC case, but it’s very expensive and its key feature – the 7in screen – won’t be of very much use to most users, no matter how impressive it looks. We prefer Silverstone’s Grandia GD03, which is much cheaper and felt less cluttered during assembly.