// PC GAMER — GAMING
MSI Maestro 900R PC case review
You will get a super-clean final build out of the Maestro 900R, and it will look stunning for the most part. But when you get up close, there are some parts which don't feel totally premium, and the price is as much of a barrier as the tempered glass side panels are to actually getting to your system's I/O ports.
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It's just me in the office today. Normally that's fine. I don't mind the quiet, and I can be as messy as I like without Jacob tutting at me. Today is different. Today that comes with a healthy dose of fear. Fear because I have to lift the MSI Maestro 900R case up onto the test bench desk, and I don't think Paul, the oddball security guard way downstairs at the front desk, will hear me if I scream because my spine has snapped. It's a two person job and I'm very much a one-person team in PC Gamer towers today. I have managed to get it situated on the desk, but I can certainly feel it in my near fifty-year-old back muscles. *Spasm*. And when you need another human on hand every time you want to shift your gaming PC about, I think that says a lot about both this MSI case and who it's aimed at.
In short, I think you need to be someone who has their own staff.
That's partly a dig at its sheer scale—this thing is chomk with a capital CHOMK—but also at the fact only the very wealthy are going to consider this chassis a worthwhile casing for their gaming PC. This is a $700 (£800) PC case and that feels, on one hand, par for the course in these days of hyper-expensive everything, but also faintly anachronistic.
As always with the case reviewing process, I built a new PC inside it, and it only felt right to be doing so with high-end gear. So, I picked from the review kit that was in the cupboard: a MSI Godlike X with a Ryzen 9 9950X3D seemed appropriate, along with some 64 GB of G.Skill ULL memory and an RTX 5090. And that's when this whole endeavour started to feel like something from a bygone age.
Before, when I'd do a high-end build, it felt exciting in a way that was both special—because I could never spend out on such premium parts myself—but also still kind of achievable, too, because the money wasn't so far beyond the realms of decency that you couldn't imagine someone normal pushing their budget a little far to get this sort of kit. But looking at the parts going into this, it's around $12,000 worth of kit at least. And that feels well beyond a normal PC gamer and into faintly distasteful territory.
But, in all honesty, I'm not even totally convinced the MSI Maestro 900R really deserves its place in such company. Sure, it's elegant in black and gold trim, but there are odd touches here and there which belie the super premium pricing. The most egregious is something I picked out when I saw a preview case out at Computex this year, and that's the top flair on the case. The metal 'lid' only covers half of the dust filter for the 360 mm cooler I'd mounted to the top, and that filter is just a flimsy plastic one I wouldn't really want on display.
I also question the utility of having the motherboard and GPU's outputs all out of reach in the centre of the case, behind tempered glass shields. There are a ton of Type-A and Type-C USB ports on the front panel, but still it's a lot of effort to get to the I/O panel of your motherboard. And don't get me started on the PSU buried right in the back of the case, with impossible-to-reach switches and plug sockets.
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