Aerocool Aero-500 Windowed Mid-Tower Chassis Review

Peter Donnell / 8 years ago

Final Thoughts

Pricing

I must confess that when I started writing this review, I didn’t know the exact price of this chassis. I knew it was a budget model, but expected it to be around £40-50 overall. So you can imagine my surprise when I found out it’s only £29.99 from Overclockers UK or £29.45 from Aria! This is absolutely incredible value for money for a chassis of this specification and I can’t stress enough ow much value for money you would be getting if you pick one up.

Overview

When looking for a budget chassis, you’re often more motivated by the price than anything else. You need something on that budget and you’ll just have to get the best spec you can hope for. Thankfully, we’ve got companies like Aerocool that are pushing the limits of what you can get for so little. The Aero-500 ticks virtually every box for a mid-to-high budget gaming PC build, offering up room for a high-end GPU, water cooling support, good airflow, cable routing, a decent amount of storage drives and more. Then we’ve got nice little bonuses like the magnetic dust filter on the top panel, dual channel fan controllers, with a fan off function too, something you don’t often see.

Aesthetics get a big thumbs up, as there’s that huge side panel window to show off your hardware, a clean-looking front panel with some stylish 5.25″ drive bay covers, and a good quality 120mm fan pre-installed too. So where does this kind of value come from? Well, there’s a few things to take into consideration here. While we do have a magnetic filter on the top, the front panel is just padded with thin foam; it does the job, but it’s a cheap and dirty solution. There’s also no intake fans as standard, so I’d immediately order at least one before you build your new rig and that is at least another £5 investment there. The panels are quite thin too, as are some of the plastics, although I’m not going to mark the chassis down for this, as it’s priced to reflect the materials used. Of course, the quality of the design helps hide the cheaper building materials, and Aerocool has certainly done a great job of making a budget chassis look a lot more like one of their higher end models.

Overall, there is a lot of chassis here for very little money. The build quality is decent enough, the design looks superb and a few little bonus features certainly help sweeten the deal. If you’re on a budget of around £30, you’re going to be hard pushed to find anything as good as this.

Pros

Stylish design
Side panel window
Reasonable cable routing spaces
Room for long GPU
120mm fan pre-installed
Some water cooling support
Magnetic dust filter on top panel
Built-in fan controllers
Very competitive price

Cons

No intake fans pre-installed
Foam dust filter on front

Neutral

Thin panels, although no more so than anything else in this price range

“The Aerocool Aero-500 is all the chassis you need for your next gaming build. It looks great, has some nice features and best of all, it’s incredibly affordable, leaving the rest of your budget to spend on faster hardware.”