Zalman Z7 Plus review

The Verdict

The Zalman Z7 Plus ATX Mid Tower chassis is a very decent chassis. Sure, no mistake here, we have seen better but they are more expensive as well. There are small flaws to be found in the chassis design, overall though it would get my thumbs up as the Z7 Plus simply offers great value for money. See this is a very affordable chassis at 55 EUR / 65  USD. For that cash you receive a Mid Tower chassis with a good and decent set of features. It has a nice design, LED fans, dust filter protections at the meshes, side fan controller, front panel hidden by a door, rubber feet protecting resonation, CPU Cooler Back Plate Hole is provided for convenient CPU cooler installation.

All the stuff I just mentioned are features you normally do not see with a chassis in this price range. Some discomforts need to be mentioned as well. The lit Zalman logo at the top doesn't feel right for me, I do not want my chassis to be a glowing commercial. For any brand that the name should be carefully hidden in a non obtrusive way. Secondly the drive cage is not at all handy. If you have your PC completely installed and need to access the 3.5" drive cage to add a new HDD, the motherboard needs to come out plain and simple. Also if you have a lengthy card like the Radeon the lower two HDD slots will be rendered useless as the HDDs and video card will block each other.

Last but not least there are no real cable management options, everybody these day's likes to run it's wires through the back of the chassis. Cooler Master for example does that really well with any (recent) model these days. These are the regular quirks of a smaller chassis though but can also be considered a bit of a missed opportunity.

So there you have it, overall the chassis does get our thumbs up and is recommended, though for a next model we like to suggest Zalman to look into that drive cage as for me it is a deal breaker.

Placed in perspective, at that price the Z7 PLUS really is hard to beat. Most people will install their PC and just leave it like that for a couple of years. For them, this is a grand option. It is a nice looking chassis at an attractive price with a very decent feature set. While not perfect it certainly is more than sufficient with a lot of Zalman flair to it.

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