The Interior
Something I have said for quite sometime is that cases need to come with thumb screws. They are inexpensive and add that extra "we love our customers" flair. Many of the high end cases do come with them and now so do the mid-range cases. The Ammo 533 had side panels that were extremely easy to remove once the thumb screws were off. Many of the cases I have had were very difficult to open up even without the screws in place. This was a nice change of pace.


Once inside, a few things I noticed off the bat were the PCI slot openings, the rails, and the position of the drive cages. The tool-less design is not something new in the PC case world. However, few companies are completely tool-less and the ones that are have insecure holds on the hardware. One example of this is a number of "tool-less" cases, including Dell cases, that have a single plastic bar that latches across all the PCI slots. This is a pain because every time you want to change once PCI card or graphics card, you have to hold them all steady while you latch this one bar and even once it's latched, the hold is not very secure on the cards. In the Ammo, each slot had its own plastic lock that held the card in place very securely. This make installation of the cards extremely simple and quick.


Another irritating thing about cases that claim a "tool-less" design, are the concept behind drive rails. When I think "tool-less", I think "no tools required." However, the drive rails always required a screwdriver to attach the rails to each drive. I am WAY too lazy for this. Thus, Cooler Master heard my anguished cries and create drive rails that simply push into place. No tools required.


This case has 5 external 5.25" bays, 1 external 3.5" bay, and 5 internal 3.5" bays. The total of 6 x 3.5" bays are divided into 2 sets of 3. The lowest cage is rotated 90 degrees to face outwards. This is great for mounting hard drives and makes cable management of the hard drives a breeze.


Installation of all the hardware was a breeze. The slide locks on the 5.25" bays and the rails for the 3.5" bays made the drives install in almost zero time. The PSU and motherboard took a standard amount of time due to no special gadgetry, but they were not anymore difficult to install than any other case. The AGP card and PCI cards installed in a snap thanks to the quick latches for each slot. I was up and running in less than 30 minutes. And keep in mind I was snapping pictures, so it may take you less.


Noise
I had the hardware running inside the case for about 4 weeks and never noticed excessive noise emissions. The most noise the case made was during boot up and heavy load times. Other than that, the system was pretty quiet. Keep in mind that I had nothing in the case that could be deemed as silent. I had standard fans, heat sinks, power supply, and no hard drive enclosures. So you can expect the same amount of noise level with an average computer.