"Cooler Master popped into the bit-tech offices the other day and was keen to let us in on its new brand - *Cooler Master Storm.* Cooler Master explained it was diversifying - no longer can you make one case series to suit all, and in that regard //Storm will become its brand with a focus on features for gamers.

So is this another company jumping on the "gamer" bandwagon then? Hmm, to some degree, yes, but it's more of a long consultation and careful consideration rather than knee jerk reaction - the product developers told us that the first three cases that will launch this coming winter (likely December) could have been launched three times already. It seems odd that more many case manufacturers are just now designing "gaming" cases, especially as Antec and Thermaltake have come to dominate this market segment in the past two years.

Cooler Master are hoping this isn't the case though (sorry, bad pun), and it has done yet another tour of Europe in order to get more opinions about the design and feature set to get it right from the outset - it's taking the Storm brand very seriously. The hint was that we'll likely see PSUs and all number of Cooler Master products under the / /Storm brand, although if they'll all be specifically tailered to work together in style/design or hardware features, we're not yet sure.

The / /Sniper case brought in was *very early sample* built around the Cosmos chassis, although the features built into it are Storm-grade. This case is the *smallest* /that will be available, with two others increasing in height that'll rival somewhere in the region of the Lian Li X2000, apparently. To counterbalance the loss of stability, Cooler Master said the tallest will also have a fatter bottom too, although we find it hard to imagine what this will look like."