If you need a mid-size gaming case, the Apollo is an excellent option.

I live in an apartment in New York City, which means I have a space slightly larger than a shoe box to store all of my stuff (those rumors you’ve heard about New York apartments aren’t just rumors). As a result, space reclamation projects hold the same importance to me as they do to land-strapped cities and I engage in them whenever possible. After recently adding a second computer to dedicate exclusively to hardware testing, I quickly came to the realization that I needed to do some more space reclamation in the form of a mid-tower case that could fit in my desk.

Fortunately, the guys at NZXT were happy to send me their latest mid-tower, the Apollo. The Apollo is a steel case design in NZXT’s Crafted Series (full specifications here) and features the futuristic lines that characterize the Crafted Series family. With a molded plastic and metal cover that comes in four colors (silver, black, blue and orange), included case window and smoked acrylic front display, the Apollo is definitely a looker, but does that beauty only run skin deep? We’ll be prying that skin open to see what’s inside.

Installation
I’ve reviewed four cases from NZXT since last fall and the Apollo is the only one where I’ve found a truly harmonious marriage of form and function. In general, everything in this case looks attractive, fits together properly, is easily accessible and doesn’t cause the sort of head scratching that plagues oh so many clever designs. The few problems I did encounter were minor annoyances. Let’s see if I can go through each installation point of case without gushing too much.

First, there’s the exterior. The matte surface of the case, while not as visually impressive as the glossy exteriors of other NZXT offerings also avoids the major problem of a gloss finish: it doesn’t scratch as easily when you lay it on the floor. NZXT likes to bury their reset buttons behind the front case door, but in this case the positioning makes sense: the angular, sci-fi lines of the Apollo’s front allow for the thin power switch at the bottom, but nothing else. There’s the aforementioned case window, with built-in GPU fan. The door stays closed by itself fairly well, although NZXT chose not to give the door’s handle a latch, opting to include two thumbscrews instead. LAN party gamers may miss the inclusion of a lock on the door latch.