MGE Sidewinder: A Look at a Gaming Chassis

Cooling

The Sidewinder has awesome potential for cooling. For its size, the Sidewinder can be a great performer as far as thermal numbers go.

It comes with three 80mm LED fans installed. One of them is placed at the front of the case as an intake. If the 80mm fan doesn't seem sufficient to cool the components in use, it can be upgraded to a 120mm fan, since MGE has provided screw holes to mount fans of both sizes.

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The second and third 80mm fans are located on the left side panel directly under the window. These two fans will mostly help cool the HDDs mounted at the front of the case as well as warm running VGA and other expansion cards installed in the system. Working with the CPU's heatsink fan and the power supply, this combination of fans should be enough to keep temperatures in the range that we feel most comfortable with.

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However, if things do seem to get a bit hot around the box, there is the option to add two more 80mm fans to the back of the case, say, as exhausts to create a front-to-back air flow. Since the Sidewinder is smaller in size overall, there is less space for warm air to circulate around inside, which helps cool components further.

MGE has also decided to include a whopping 400W power supply with the Sidewinder. Though priced at around $22, it is a great complement to a value class chassis.

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