Budget cases have been steadily improving since Aopen raised expectations of what they should offer many years ago. Foxconn’s new ZL142A ticks the style and price boxes, while managing to remain quite usable at the same time.

The internals are standard pressed steel fare. It’s very clean and offers adequate room to work with, although if you are planning on regularly changing the internals of your computer you should consider a higher end case. Most of the edges are rolled, but several protruding pieces of metal that surround the screw holes in the optical drive bays are waiting to slice careless fingers open.

Its hinged door covers any 5.25” drives you may have installed in the case. It swings out and latches in place to the left, and is held in place with two magnets when closed. The lights for power and hard drive activity are hidden behind the door, but thankfully the power and reset buttons are accessible from the front of the case. The case doesn’t ship with a power supply, which means you get to pick one that will match the scale of your machine.

The hard drive mounting system is unusual, as you have to screw four special screws into a drive before sliding it into one of the four bays. Once you do, a piece of plastic locks the screw and by extension the drive into place. Drives are mounted traditionally, with the connectors facing any expansion cards in your system. This will be a problem if you use an 8800 GTS or larger graphics card, as they will obscure the connectors to any drive bay they line up with.

Expansion cards are held in place with a plastic bracket that is wedged solidly in place in between cut-outs in the case. You can pop this out by levering it to dislodge the plastic wedge that clips into a punched-out section of the case, but it requires a worrying amount of force to detach. A single 80mm fan is included at the back. If you want to replace it, mounts for 100 and 120mm fans are pre drilled. A ducted intake on the side of the case that lets the processor breathe cool air.

Although it may not be the nicest case to work with, it’s perfectly adequate if you plan on installing components once and then forgetting about them. And as a very definite bonus, it’s classier than other cases in its price bracket. Use the money the case saves you to treat yourself to a powerful CPU.