A Tempered Glass RGB ATX Case For Just £30/$40?! (CiT Galaxy Review)

On paper this case seems to have it all: temperered glass, support for the main motherboards (ATX, mATX and mini ITX), a PSU shroud, various cable routing holes, an RGB strip and fan, USB 3 and more. So HOW is it available to buy for just £30 (approx $40)?

I recently purchased this case so in this video I will give my honest thoughts on exactly what this case’s strengths and weaknesses are, and cover everything you need to know about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKQNZBnmbKs&t=52s

If you prefer text over video, please read on for the guide/transcript version of this video.

Video Transcript And Guide

Hey everyone! This is the CiT Galaxy ATX case, and I’m really excited about it because it only cost me £30, which is $40, but it has a number of really cool features, especially for this price point.

As its name suggests, it’s ATX – it supports full-height ATX motherboards, as I’ll show off later in this video. It also comes with an RGB strip and an RGB fan, and you can press a button here to control the modes when you’ve actually built the computer. For now, I’ve hidden it down here just because I needed to steal SATA power from my existing computer.

This case also comes with a tempered glass side panel, which I need to be careful laying down so it doesn’t smash (like those people on Reddit). But in general, it begs the question: if this case supports full ATX motherboards, has RGB strips and an RGB fan, and comes with a tempered glass side panel along with a PSU shroud and USB 3 up top, what is this case compromising on? How can it be that cheap and offer so many features? Well, let’s find out.

Initial Look At Case

The case itself has a fairly good build quality, actually. It’s obviously thinner metal in places, but it doesn’t flex that much. If I’m going like that now, it doesn’t flex much, which is pretty good. Most of it is metal. If we look at the bottom, it’s got quite good sturdy feet with pads that don’t scratch your floor, which is great.

This PSU shroud is a bit annoying, though. The actual filter that goes in it – because you can’t just slide it out like you can in some cases – you actually have to balance that there. You actually have to get it out like that to clean it, and then you’re going to bend it. You can already see I’ve bent mine in a few places. See, it just doesn’t go in very well. So that’s not really ideal.

But the case itself, yeah, it’s pretty good. It’s got a PSU shroud, fan mount points – you’ve got space for two fans there and there if you want on the PSU shroud, which I don’t tend to use, but you could use if you want.

In terms of the back, it’s fairly standard. You’ve got space for another 120mm fan, and they have included an RGB fan. Then you’ve got your standard PCI Express ports, and the PSU goes in the bottom, which is great. I always prefer that.

In terms of the back panel, you’ve got a certain level of room to actually put your cables behind and cable manage everything. What I actually like is this area – there’s actually a decent amount of clearance here, so that’s quite nice because you can hide quite a lot of cables here, which is pretty good.

We then come to the front of the case, and it’s got this nice effect. As you’ve seen before, it’s got an RGB strip up there. You’ve then got little fan grills here just to actually keep out the dust and things and make sure fresh air can come in. At the top, you have space for two other fans – 120mm on the inside or 240mm if you want, which is great.

I said in the intro that it has USB 3 up top. I was kind of wrong about that, sorry. It’s got one USB 3 port, and then the rest are USB 2, which is a bit disappointing. But again, this is a £30 case, so you’re not going to be able to criticize too much, in my opinion. At least it’s got one USB 3 port, and you could always buy a USB 3 hub if you really wanted.

In terms of the other parts of the case, if we look inside it: firstly, the motherboard standoffs. By default, you get six standoffs, so one, two, three, four, five, six, and they were labeled. So AM – I mean, it could be ATX, Micro ATX, or Mini ATX. So it includes the four you need for a Mini ATX motherboard, and it also includes two more down here for ATX. But then that’s it.

In the instruction book, they tell you that they include two more motherboard standoffs, which I guess for Micro ATX, you could just have one there and one there, and that would sort of be enough. But for ATX, I feel like you actually need more than that. So I had two spare ones, so I’ve ended up putting one, two, three there because I got an ATX motherboard. But what I’ll probably do is just go through my bag of computer-building stuff and try and find another one for here. It probably does have enough support, to be honest, right now, but really, the fact that they cheap out and only give you two motherboard standoffs is a bit of a pity.

One thing, though, that was really annoying was to get the extra motherboard standoffs in. It was just really hard. What I actually had to do was make the hole a bit bigger with a screwdriver and then switch over to pliers and actually kind of brute force them in a little bit. It was really hard to get them in. I’ve built quite a lot of computers, and I’ve never had that much difficulty in getting extra motherboard standoffs in. So that’s another area where I feel that they’ve cheaped out a little bit. Yes, this is only a £30 or $40 case, but yeah, really, that was a bit of a pity.

Dimensions

In terms of the case as a whole, it’s 45cm tall and 33cm long. Not sure what that is in Freedom units, but on the screen now – that makes it slightly bigger than some of my other Micro ATX cases. For example, I got an older Corsair Carbide 88R case, and actually, this is a few centimeters bigger, but not that much bigger, to be honest. And my old case isn’t the best – it doesn’t have a PSU shroud and only supports Micro ATX motherboards. So the fact that this is only slightly bigger than that case and it supports a full-size ATX motherboard is really good.

This doesn’t support E-ATX motherboards, though. It literally would just be Mini ITX, Micro ATX, and ATX motherboards. The case itself has quality cable routing holes, which is great. You know, everywhere you look, there’s holes, and there’s no rough edges or anything. It’s not going to snag on your cables. And obviously, you’ve got the PSU shroud, so effectively what would happen is you hide your PSU in here, and then you can pop the cables out here, but also here and here as needed. But also, naturally, you can run them behind the case as well and then pop them into the other bits as you need. So there’s a lot of cable management potential, and as I mentioned before, this is a fairly deep bit of the case, so you could actually have quite a lot of cables here hidden away and then just pop out the cables where you need it. So when I do end up doing this build, it’s going to be looking fairly smart inside. It’s not going to have loads of cables running everywhere.

Cheaper Build Quality

As I’ve already mentioned, there are some cheaper parts of the build, though. For example, the front panel connectors don’t exactly look great. We’ll hold up there so we can hopefully see them. You can see one there and one over there. You literally just got the circuit board on display there and then the cables coming down, which isn’t exactly great because you can see that, considering this has a big side window. So you will actually see that.

Equally, the fan itself has some marks and plastic molding issues. I’m looking at it in the light now, and you can actually see where there are molding issues and stuff. It’s not going to look really high quality like if you bought an Arctic fan or Thermaltake or Noctua or any other fan. So the fan isn’t quite as good-looking, but again, you wouldn’t overly see that. I probably won’t use this ARGB fan, though, for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, I have five or six other Arctic fans. I seem to just collect them, so I’m just going to stick them in here – two on the front, two on the top, and one at the back. And I’m probably not going to bother with the RGB fan at the back.

Flaws With RGB

But there’s actually a bigger issue, and it’s that the RGB support for this case isn’t exactly ideal.

If we follow the – there’s two plugs coming out of the RGB strip. We see them there. If we come to the back now, you can see them – one here and one here. So this one is actually marked as the reset button. What they’ve actually done is basically they’ve hijacked the standard reset button you’d have on a case. They’ve hijacked that for LED control of the RGB lights. You’ve got, I think, 12 or 13 different modes, which is kind of cool, but it means you no longer have a reset button there, and they’ve hijacked control of that.

But also, the ARGB – if you look at this cable, so following this along, it then goes into the standard cables here and then sort of gets eaten up. When I first got this case, I was looking for the ARGB header to plug into my motherboard, and I couldn’t see one anywhere. I was tracing all the cables back, and what they’ve actually done, when I checked the manual, is the ARGB support is completely proprietary.

So what that means is you’ve got this cable coming all the way from the fan, and then you’ve got this cable coming all the way from the RGB strip at the front of the case. They then connect together, and that’s just for daisy chain support for the fans. They connect together, and then you just got this for SATA power, and that’s it. And obviously, as I mentioned before, they then hijack the reset button to give you control of the modes up here.

What this means is you can’t actually plug it into the motherboard and the ARGB header and control things by whatever software you’d use. They’ve gone a different route and cheaped out on it a little bit. And again, this is a £30 or $40 case, but that is a bit of a pity because, you know, this is marketed as an RGB case, and then it’s their own proprietary version that you can’t even control in the standard way.

SDD/HDD Support

This case has support for a couple of SSDs and a couple of hard drives. To be honest, I don’t intend to use them anymore. I just go with M.2 for me, but I still wanted to point out where you could put them. So you’ve got markers for SSD here, so you can put one or two up there, and then there’s another marker here for SSD. Look at that there. There’s also a marker for hard drives there. So basically, you could put a hard drive or an SSD there, but obviously, if you do mount your drives here, then you’re not going to put fans there. But as I mentioned, I don’t tend to actually put my fans on the PSU shroud anyway. I’m happy to have two intakes, two or three exhausts, and that’s good enough for me.

Front Panel

In terms of other parts of the case, if I just quickly take the front panel off, you end up with this. I got to be careful now because of all the cables, but you end up with this. So you’ve got the front thing, which obviously brings in some air there. This bit is solid, though, so this won’t actually bring in any air. With knowing it’s just from J, but that’ll be enough. In terms of the front, as you can see, there’s plenty of support here (for 3x 120mm fans), and in general, this case does support water cooling, which is great.

Motherboard Support

In terms of the motherboard, as I mentioned earlier, this supports up to ATX but not E-ATX. But an ATX motherboard will fit fairly well. So you’ll be around there. You can see in the case it’s a fairly snug fit. Obviously, you’ve got cable routing holes here, so you can actually pop cables up there. You could pop cables out there.

So overall, it’s a pretty good case. This isn’t the best – they’ve cheaped out in some areas. It’s a bit of a pity that the ARGB isn’t standard support via the motherboard header up there. It would have been nice if I could plug in there and control it with other software, but it is what it is. I would have also liked more than just one USB 3 port, but again, it’s better to have one than nothing.

My Final Thoughts

But this case, yeah, is pretty good. It’s CiT Galaxy or CIT Galaxy. I paid £32 for it, including next-day shipping. That’s why I said at the start it’s £30… because that’s pretty much what I would have paid for it when you exclude the next-day shipping. And yeah, £30 or $40 for a case like this is pretty good, in my opinion.

And as I mentioned as well, it has a tempered glass window. I’ve deliberately kind of left it out of this particular demo just because I don’t want it falling and smashing, but again, it looks quite nice. I’m just going to hold it up and be really careful. I don’t have a turntable, so I’m just going to do that. It just looks pretty nice.

I’m really glad that I, you know, got this case. It’s ATX, which will be great for me because my current case can’t support a networking card, which has been the bane of my existence. So this is going to be good. This will be a nice upgrade for me, and it’s not much bigger than my current case. So I’m looking forward to doing a build in it in the future.