You'll have to cope with the lack of a handle

Look inside the Armor A30 and you'll find a welcome sight: Nearly everything is modular. By loosening a few thumb screws here and there, you can remove the entire optical-drive cage, the hard-drive cage (affixed to the floor just below it), and even the motherboard tray, which guarantees you'll have all the elbow room you need to install all the components you'll want in your system.

The power supply bracket is likewise removable, but you'll need your Phillips screwdriver to get it out. The same is true of the expansion slots: Though the screw rail is protected by a bracket attached with a thumb screw, to actually open the slots you'll need your screwdriver again. You'll also want to keep it handy for when you're installing your optical drives and 3.5-inch hard drives. Given how accessible so much of the Armor A30 is, it's a bit odd that the entire thing isn't tool-free.

Additional bells and whistles are few, and oddities both minor and generally unobtrusive. It's not really possible to take off the front panel without dismantling and removing the optical-drive cage. If you have two 3.5-inch hard drives to install in the floor cage, you'll need to position one of them upside-down in order to fit properly. You don't need to screw in 2.5-inch drives at all: Two plastic clips that come with the case let you securely attach them to the top of the optical drive bay with no additional hardware whatsoever. Only one thing was absent that we thought negatively impacted the Armor A30: a handle. There's not one built in, and there's not even one in the box you can attach yourself, as with the NZXT Vulcan. For a case designed with mobility in mind, this strikes us a serious omission.

In building a test system in the Armor A30, we didn't find much else missing. We ran into no trouble installing any of our components; in fact, doing so in the Armor A30 was easier even than in many ATX tower cases, thanks to all the individual cages we could remove and replace as needed. The only real wrinkle we ran into was cable management. It's perhaps unavoidable in a case of this size, but you'll need to snake cables in odd directions to connect every component and fan; as there's no space beneath the motherboard tray for storage, something you'll find in many ATX cases, the inside of your PC could look like a spider web. Using the included cable ties will help some, but this is going to be a chore no matter what you do. We'd definitely recommend seriously considering using a modular power supply in the Armor A30, so you can cut down on most of the interior clutter.

You won't have to make too many other compromises when using the Thermaltake Armor A30, however. It packs enough build-friendly features into its miniature frame that you won't feel slighted because you didn't go with a larger tower. You'll have to cope with the lack of a handle, but as it is the Armor A30 isn't too big to cart around regularly. And once you see the range of options it gives you, chances are you'll want to do just that.