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Oh boy. Where to start...?
There is a saying in this industry; "Not a bad product, just a bad price". To expand upon that, even low grade products do often serve a place, often being a good fit for more budget friendly builds or needs. For example, a very low quality cooler that is not adequate to cool an Intel Core i7 could be good enough for a Pentium processor. The issue being if that low quality cooler is prices in the same league as a cooler that is adequate for an i7, it's overpriced. But if that same cooler was instead priced much lower, then it would be a good product for the class of chip it was adequate for.
All that is to say... the axiom is not true in this case. We cannot recommend this case, at any price. Or, these cases, as both the M1 and M2 released side-by-side, so we've reviewed both of them.
It's not all bad, there's just a lot of it, and in the worst places. To start with, the weight. When these boxes were first delivered, I genuinely thought they were mistakenly shipped empty. That's how lightweight these things are! And while "heavy" is not always synonymous with "quality", when the box plus contents don't weigh as much as empty box from another case, it's not a good sign to start.
Unboxing these does give me the first good news I can offer. The box is double layered and it's got custom molded, high quality foam endcaps. These are only about 1/2 inch thick (wouldn't recommend shipping an assembled computer in this box without at least 2" thick padding), which is more than enough to keep this very lightweight case safe during shipping. Plus the case comes wrapped in a protective plastic bag to ensure it's scratch free at the destination. Delivery was a breeze.
First impressions after taking it out of the case were not very much of an improvement. It came out of the box easily enough and unwrapping the case, we put both of them side-by-side. Other than the M2 being around 2 inches taller and having 2 more PCIe slots for full ATX support (the M1 only supports up to mATX size), but other than that there seem to be no differences. They have the same front panel, the same fan and accessories included, and the same bad design. They do have different manuals, which in the form of a 1-page, double sided piece of paper, but the M1 has the M1 in the diagrams and the M2 has the M2. Interesting that such a cheap design had double the budget for design space on the manual, but that's how they chose to do it.
Pulling them out and checking them over, they do look fairly nice, which is my second nice thing to say about this case. Sadly, it will also be the last. A sleek, simple black box with a good paint job. It's nothing fancy, no bells and whistles. But for a budget case, that's often not even wanted. So a simple black box design with a good paint job is just what was ordered, and that's a positive thing.
At this point, other than the height of the M2, there is nothing noteworthy about any differences. Nothing at all. From here all photos will be exclusively of the M1. We saw no point to doubling the amount of work photographing this case twice when 90% of it is exactly the same across both models.
The glass side panel is the thinnest I've ever seen! The thumbscrews are a cheap plastic that painfully digs into your skin, and removing them is tedious because they're about twice as long as any other case uses.
Once the side panel is off, we see the interior. The case has it's 1 included fan, hanging in a bag that is cable-tied to the back. There's not much to say about this fan, it's just a plain black, mid performance 120mm fan; a fair fan in a budget build, nothing really positive or negative to say about it.
The rest of the front IO is just hanging loose in the case and rattling around. The manual is also loose in the case, as well as one small plastic bag of accessories.
I have no complaints about the manual. It's simple and covers the basics, plus a few PC building staples/tips.
The accessories it comes with are minimal, just the bare minimum screws needed to assemble, about 4 cable ties, and one plastic standoff because... they decided not to put enough real standoffs in this case. Overall, about what would be expected in an extreme budget case accessories package.
The front IO is very disappointing. It's mounted to the front panel and removing it for replacement/repair is possible, though it's a chore to disassemble the case and remove the front panel. You would likely need to completely remove whatever system you have built inside to do so. The USB choices are also bad. It uses both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 Type-A connectors. Both of these connectors support up to 2 ports each, yet each is only used for 1 port. In a case with no cable management, this is a bad decision to add more unnecessary cables. Genuinely, 1 cable for 2 x 2.0 would have been better than this. Yes, technically one 3.0 port is better in performacne, but not in practicality. Instead, they doubled the cables and halved the efficiency of cables in a case with zero cable management.
If we take a tour of the outside of the case, we can see everything else this case has to offer. The front panel has a squishy and not very satisfying power and reset button, the aux port is a combo instead of split, and the two USB Type-A ports previously mentioned. There is one LED below the power button and above the reset button that flashes blue to indicate HDD activity, and there is a red LED embedded in the center of the power button to indicate power status.
The top of the case has a magnetic dust filter. Ideally, the top will be used for exhaust instead of intake, so this is almost purely decorative, but top dust filters do help stop dust settling onto the PC from getting inside when the system is turned off and there's no airflow to naturally prevent that from happening.
Around to the back, we see the breakaway PCIe slot covers and an easy access PCIe... not entirely sure if there's a universal name for these things, but "topper" is what I will go with. There's an easy access PCIe topper. This is as has been popularized by NZXT on many of their cases, and it's a nice touch of quality that I did not expect to see. Until I tried to use it and it has only 1/2 inch of travel to it, meaning it does not move far enough out of the way to be useful. I had to end up removing it entirely, and putting it back after was a chore because of the cheap flimsy metal. You can also see how the "MADE IN CHINA" stamp deformed the metal here. Truly, any metal that is so thin that a stamp on the frame deforms it shouldn't be suitable for a PC case.
Finally, on bottom, we see simple thick rubber feet and a perforated intake cut into the bottom for the power supply. This is one of the rare differences between the two cases; on our M1 it included a magnetic dust filter for this intake, but the M2 did not. Not sure if this is an intentional choice, something was forgotten, or a QA failure, but we only got one bottom dust filter among two cases.
And that's... pretty much it. There is no rear panel to come off. There is non cable management (absolutely none). There are no other features.
The case supports exactly one 3.5" HDD (mounted on top at the front) and exactly one 2.5" HDD or SSD (mounted on bottom at the front).
The case supports up to 4 fans, obstensibly. However, we found that the top mounted fans are too close to the motherboard to not support standard fans of 25mm thickness; would need slim fans of 15mm or so thickness to make it work. The one rear exhaust fan has a bit of play and can likely work around different motherboard needs, and you could mount one (1) intake fan. Overall, it truly supports a neutral air pressure environment, but on paper it's geared towards negative pressure, which is a choice.
Some other things we've taken note of include:
It included an odd number of screws (we built this with one 2.5" SSD, and we had 3 screws for it instead of 4; we had to provide the extra from our own resources, which isn't good for someone personally building who wouldn't have extras lying around).
The back panel did have a couple screws through the main chassis, but it's riveted in other places. We think it was originally designed slightly differently with a removable back panel, then somewhere in the design stages they changed to make it riveted, and just never removed all of the screws.
There were sharp edges in this case. Not only the breakaway PCIe covers (which is common), but around the front mounting points; I cut myself installing the front intake fan. Be careful about this, you don't want to make the same mistake!
Really, that's all we can say about this case. It's extremely simple, and despite looking somewhat nice in a simple way, it's not really a case we would ever recommend building in. Not the least of which is because it does not have any cable management to speak of.
It's a shame, really, as we like Musetex in general; they're trying new things in the budget space and putting out computer components at low prices in this economy when it's hard for new people to get into this hobby. But we cannot truly recommend these cases at any price point.
Speaking of price point... that's a good question. It was $50 for the M1 and $60 for the M2 at the time we ordered these. It was $25 for the M1 and $35 for the M2 when they were delivered. Now, at the time of writing this review, the M1 is listed as $40 while the M2 is listed as $50. Not sure what's going on with that, but no matter what the price is we say don't buy it. It's terribly designed and not a case I would ever recommend, at any price, but hey, if that's what you're looking for, and you can read all about the more technical specs or order your own on Amazon here.
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