Verdict: Hardly a stately pleasure dome for your PC.
When it comes to making cases, SilverStone has a reputation for making huge, heavy brutes designed to house the kind of gaming rigs that give environmentalists nightmares. We were interested to see, therefore, how this philosophy would translate to a midi-tower case. Compared with the mighty Temjin series, the Kublai KL01 is rather petite. However, it feels very front heavy, as if the door is made of pig iron, or there's a hidden stash of gold inside it.
While the size and style of the KL01 won't worry mighty Temjins or giant Lian-Li towers, the KL01 is still a midi-tower case and can house an ATX motherboard.
On top of the case at the front is the reset switch, accompanied by two USB ports, FireWire and the headset sockets. Below this on the front of the case is the power switch. They're robustly made and well finished. The door looks good and is also solidly made. However, it lacks a handle - you have to paw at it to open it, which is annoying and potentially embarrassing.
The size of the case, and the fact that it's made from steel rather than aluminium, makes the price look quite steep. The sub-£30 A+ CS-188AF covers everything you need from a midi-tower with grace and élan, so the KL01 had better have some good tricks to justify its £66 asking price.
Behind the stern front door are the four 5.25in drive bays and the single external 3.5in bay, which can, if needed, accommodate a fifth 5.25in appliance. Below this is a 120mm intake fan that will blow air over the hard disk bay behind it. The hard disk rack can handle four disks, and even has a special fitting for wiring in your first S-ATA disk that keeps tangled cabling to a minimum. This fitting mechanism also allows the hard disk to be swapped quickly and easily, but this is a feature of questionable utility. Preferential treatment for one drive isn't much good if you have several, but the KL01 isn't a case equipped to take too much stuffing anyway.
Between the rear of the drive bays and the rear wall of the case, conditions are fairly cramped. The case is only 480mm deep, compared with 500mm plus for many towers. An ATX motherboard will fit, although it won't leave much space for easy cable routeing, and you'll struggle to fit in an 8800 GTX-sized card, especially if you use many hard disks.
Cooling for the KL01 conforms to the standard ATX tower cooling model to such an extent that it almost seems boring. There's one 120mm intake fan in the lower section of the front of the case, and a quiet 120mm exhaust fan in the upper area of the rear of the case. With a solid side panel, there are no side intake shenanigans - even the windowed version (KL01-BW) has no extra fan mounts.
However, while we like the conventional cooling model espoused in the KL01, we have concerns about its implementation. When closed, the door blocks the front intake, and while SilverStone uses mesh around the sides of the door in part to circumvent this problem, we're not convinced that it lets enough air through. More worrying are the cramped conditions inside the case when a powerful PC is installed - the size of the drive bays and the use of a large graphics card will restrict airflow from the front fan to the rear exhaust. The internal design results in a cramped PC, and the cooling on offer is therefore underwhelming. The cramped internals also preclude the use of anything but the very simplest of water-cooling systems.
Conclusion
The Kublai KL01 is a £66 case that essentially offers nothing beyond what you could get for half the cost. It may look attractive, and could probably have won an early season of 'Robot Wars' if you stuck wheels on it, but the cooling system is too weak for the cramped conditions that the oversized drive bays and compact dimensions create. The case also offers very little in the way of innovation, and the steel construction results in it weighing more than 8kg, which makes it heavy for a LAN rig.
For the sort of money the KL01 costs, you're not far off the price of a much bigger case - the Antec P180 now costs around £78, for example. Even the Gigabyte 3D Mars, which is made from lightweight aluminium and has fancy, helpful extras, costs only £82.
The KL01 failed to impress us in every department and displayed some worrying deficiencies. It can't justify its price.
