The Casetronic Travla C137 is certainly small, slim, and sexy, but how well designed and functional is it?
The cardboard packaging comes with a nifty handle
Casetronic was nice enough to provide us with a loaner version of their Travla C137 mini-itx case for this review (thank you!). The supplied unit was outfitted with a PCI riser card, PCI riser extension, instructions, 90 watt external "laptop brick" style power supply, DC-DC converter and of course the case itself.
The obligatory what came in the box picture
The case measures (WxHxD) 12.7" x 2.7" x 10" and accepts mini-itx form factor and some flex-atx motherboards.
The C137 is made out of aluminum and cold rolled steel. The anodized aluminum on the front panel looks slick, but what I really appreciated about the C137 is that it doesn't have any sharp or rough edges. I've never built a PC where I didn't maul myself on some jagged unfinished edge. Having everything either rolled over or cleanly/smoothly ‘machined’ meant a lot to me (and my delicate hands )
A look at the C137 innards
The C137 has a few different internal mounting configurations available depending on if you want to make use of the front compact flash reader slot, or use 2 PCI slots with a laptop hard drive. As the BYOPVR test bench is currently thin on parts and because it’s more cost effective, I used a full sized 3.5” hard disk. This limited my options somewhat, but was glad the case has the ability to accept a full hard disk (while only sacrificing one PCI slot/back plane). If you are going to put in an optical drive (CD or DVD) in this case it has to be a slim line one (and don’t forget to pickup a slim line drive to IDE adapter).
by: Erik Pettersen ( reviews AT byopvr.com )
