Building a PC into a mini-ITX chassis is always a game of constraints. The mini-ITX form factor itself is a compromise: one PCI Express slot on the motherboard, components crammed in to the max, and just enough power delivery and PCB real estate to meet the needs of a compact PC case. No one sent Streacom the memo with its DA2 V2 PC chassis, however. It conforms to the mini-ITX form factor but gives you more flexibility in terms of component fitment, aesthetic flexibility, and sheer eye appeal than almost any mini-ITX chassis we’ve handled. It’s kitted out in impeccably machined aluminum, with an Apple hardware vibe to it, and in keeping with that costs a pretty penny. (The base chassis is $279, and must-have add-ons raise the price from there.) But it snags our Editors’ Choice award for premium mini-ITX PC cases for its sheer quality of manufacture and quantity of options. You can build a stunning, minimalist mini-ITX powerhouse with this case as a base, whether you want to emphasize looks, liquid cooling, or even lots of drives.
The Design: Maximum Minimalist Metal
If your preferred PC case type is “minimalist metal,” with perhaps a sheet of glass or two thrown in, you’re going to fall hard for the DA2 V2. As it comes from Streacom, the chassis is aluminum on all sides, measuring 11.2 by 7.1 by 13.2 inches (HWD).
The left and right side panels are sheer sandblasted-surface aluminum perforated with round holes for ventilation, and the front and top are plain, curvy aluminum expanses with slight interruptions for a port panel and nothing else. (The “V2” in the product name refers to some slight changes in the design made in late 2020, mostly around the location of some of the holes in the chassis; the original DA2 debuted in 2018.) Our test model was in aluminum silver; you can also get the DA2 V2 in black for the same price.
Indeed, the port panel is the biggest exemplar of this case’s minimalist aesthetic. As received, the chassis has a module installed in the front face with a power button and a single USB Type-C port in an oval gap in the panel.
The header cable for the USB port terminates in a 19-pin USB header, but Streacom thoughtfully offers a second header cable you can install in its place using the newer USB 3.2-type header for USB-C, if your motherboard is so equipped. You can also opt for a USB Type-A module if you want to go older-school.
This attention to user detail—and the possible hardware people might install—permeates the design of the DA2. All of the case panels and edges are carefully blunted or chamfered to keep you from cutting or nicking your hands. Streacom also provides one of the best-laid-out, most sensible, and most clearly illustrated printed manuals we’ve seen from a case maker in a long time. It’s a good thing, too, because this chassis gives you lots of options for placing your components.
The installation of most components involves installing and adjusting a series of vertical and horizontal rails and brackets, in essence constructing the inner scaffolding of the case onto which you install your main components (the power supply, the motherboard, and any 2.5- or 3.5-inch drives). Usually, building out any mini-ITX system has to be planned more carefully than most PC builds, with the component installation constraints in some case designs making it impossible to install certain components before others. The DA2 is one of the more forgiving mini-ITX chassis we have worked in over the years, however.
The rails are the key to the DA2. Think of the main chassis as a big hoop with tracks running along the top and bottom from front to back on both sides. You slip some small square nuts into each track through a couple of cutaways, then screw a corresponding hex or Philips dome-head screw into place into each nut. These screws and nuts engage with the structural rails, holding the rail in whatever position on the track you want.
These structural rails make up the mounting points for hardware in the interior of the case. Thus, you have some flexibility in where you mount the cross brackets and braces and other components in the case. (Note: The nuts tend to slide around if they aren’t leaning against something. It helps to slightly start the screw into the nut, then slide them together into the track. You can then slide the rails under the screws via their open side, and tighten the screws over them.)
For starters, we had to reposition three vertical rails containing the four standoffs on which a typical mini-ITX motherboard mounts. (These rails come installed on the case in the “typical build” position, but they have to be turned upside-down and moved for vertical GPU mounting, as we’ll get into later.) Mind the instruction manuals and don’t try and wing it; these rails must be installed in the proper orientation. Similarly, cross braces and a bracket suspend your power supply unit (PSU). The bracket for the PSU has mounting points for either ATX or SFX supplies, so you can run with a full-size PSU you have on hand or opt for a space-saving SFX one. Note that an ATX supply will limit the length of video card you can install; it will butt into the video card’s space, so you’ll be limited to a card up to 8.6 inches long. With an SFX or SFX-L supply, you can install a graphics card up to 11.8 inches long, which covers most reasonably sized models on the market.
In addition, the ability to mount the PSU bracket at one of several heights on its rails means you can maximize the space used for a short PSU or extend it for, say, a longer SFX-L model. (SFX-L models have the same height and width footprint as ordinary SFX supplies; they’re just longer to allow for more internal hardware and thus wattage per unit volume.)
Drive mounting is also super-freeform in this case. Streacom calls some of its mounting rails Universal Brackets, so you can mount fans on these at various widths, or even drives directly onto them. These would lie parallel to the side panels. You can also use the included Drive Bracket to mount up to six 2.5-inch drives or three 3.5-inch drives (or some combination thereof). The Drive Bracket can then be mounted on the Universal Bracket where it makes the most sense for your specific build.
The Universal Bracket rails also support cooling and fan options. The DA2 V2 comes with no fans in the box, with the idea that you will design your own custom cooling arrangement. You can mount an oversize 200mm fan on the side rails, a 92mm fan in the rear exhaust position, and 120mm fans on the horizontal brackets or on the case bottom.
You can also mount a liquid cooler’s radiator (120mm to 280mm long) on rails on the opposite side of the case from the motherboard. It would be hidden by the side panel and exhaust its warm air out through the panel’s perforations.
The DA2: A Wealth of Nifty Accessories
Building out a system into the DA2 can be a quick and slapdash affair, if you like, since the default two side panels are opaque and will let you hide away hasty or lazy cable routing efforts. But if you want to make a showcase PC with inner lights (which you provide; this case has none), clean cabling, and maybe even vertical GPU mounting, Streacom’s got you covered.
Our review sample of the DA2 came with an array of optional extras. Streacom offers the following options for the case, which we received with our sample:
- DA2 VGPU Vertical GPU Kit, including riser cable ($94.28)
- DA2 TG Kit Tempered Glass Side Panels ($58.95)
- DA2 Extra Front Panel Port Set ($35.26)
The prices are from Streacom’s online store. We decided for our test build to roll out most of the bits, building out a PC with the side-panel glass kit…
…and putting a venerable (and not small) GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition card, decked out in classy matching aluminum, into the vertical GPU mount on full display. One thing to note: If you’re going to use the vertical mount kit, read the instructions for it first, or else you’ll be rebuilding the PC once you see the build sequence. Here you can see the parts…
Installing the vertical GPU kit requires swapping out the entire back panel of the chassis (a whole new one, with the appropriately positioned slots for the vertical card mount, comes with the kit), as well as mounting the motherboard in a lower position. That’s not optional; if you don’t, the board’s I/O plate won’t line up with the new rear panel. Here, you can see the motherboard in its new “vertical GPU” position versus the I/O plate placement of the stock back panel…
You do this by flipping over the three vertical rails that support the motherboard, so the standoffs are in a different position relative to the motherboard. You also have to swap the positions of two of them. That said, at least you don’t have to unscrew the standoffs themselves.
It seems a tad extravagant to swap out the whole back panel, machined so exquisitely out of aluminum, for a whole other one with a similar slick design, but we can’t argue with the clean look of the results…
That goes doubly so with the tempered-glass side panel kit; you get two panels to replace the high-quality perforated aluminum ones. The TG Kit includes a transparent side panel for one side and a “blackout panel” (also in glass, backed by metal) on the other. The blackout panel creates a jet-black backdrop for your parts, which helps blend away black cabling and lets other, non-black parts stand off well against its backdrop.
The original solid side metal panels on the DA2 attach via a sort of friction fit, with some rubber pads around the edges of the panels engaging with the frame and holding the sides snugly on. The glass panels, however, are held on partly by magnets, and in part by slotting a couple of discs at the bottom of the panels into grooves in the frame. The bottom portion of each panel is quite secure once slid into place, but the rest merely sticks to the rest of the frame via magnetic strips on either side of the glass. It doesn’t feel like it should be all that secure, but it holds on well enough and allows for an ultraclean, no-screws-or-fasteners look. Just don’t try and lift the DA2 with a hand on either side panel, or the glass could lift right out. (Streacom actually recommends that you remove the glass panels before trying to move the case.)
The vertical GPU kit is similarly basics-only. You install the new back panel, and before you install the motherboard in its different position, you install a cross-brace on which the vertical GPU riser assembly rests. The kit’s included riser cable then goes into the mainboard’s PCI Express slot, and the whole riser assembly simply rests on the cross-brace. The only stability is afforded by the video card itself being screwed into the case’s backplane.
We did this with our two-slot-wide GTX 1080 card. It looked like it should be wobbly, but it was quite stable and looked great.
The Build Process
The main advice we can give here: Trust and follow the manuals, and if you buy any of the add-on kits, read their manuals, too, before you start. Using one of these kits may reshuffle some of the build process. Also sort out your screws and nuts before you start! You get a few…
In our case, we mounted the mainboard before consulting the VGPU Kit instructions, and had to remove the board, swap out the stock back panel, flip the motherboard mounting rails over top to bottom, reinstall them, swap in the kit’s back panel, and remount the motherboard—twice!—in the course of the test build. The second time remounting the board was to accommodate some cable routing behind it. (Learn from our mistake: Don’t try to route any cables on the outside of the rails, because the tempered-glass side panels then won’t install flush. The cables need to run inside of the rails.)
We built out the DA2 using an MSI B350 Gaming mini-ITX board equipped with 16GB of G.Skill RAM, a Ryzen 7 CPU, and a Plextor SATA M.2 SSD which mounted on the underside of the motherboard (as M.2 drives often must on crowded mini-ITX PCBs). Our PSU was a SilverStone SFX-L 700-watt model, the SST-SX700-LPT. We opted not to install any 2.5- or 3.5-inch drives, keeping the interior super-clean to show off the GTX 1080 card in all its matching silver finery. The CPU used AMD’s stock cooler; you can install tower coolers up to 145mm tall, though a really tall one might collide with your graphics card if you use the vertical GPU mounting kit.
Installing the various vertical rails is simple enough, but you’ll need some dexterity to work with the hex screws and the tiny Allen wrench that Streacom provides with the kit. Some of the secondary rails and cross braces don’t use the hex screws, but normal Philips screws; the hex screws are reserved for things that you likely won’t be adjusting much if at all, like the motherboard mounts and the back panel. While gatekeeping the advanced upgrades behind hex screws is visually consistent, it’s no big hassle either way.
When adjusting the rails for the motherboard, we just slightly unscrewed the hex screws, slid each rail to its ideal position with screws and nuts loosely attached, then retightened the screws. We also took off the extra vertical rails on the left side of the case to secure the motherboard to the standoffs, and we were tempted to temporarily remove the bottom air-filter net (secured by two acrylic panels) for more room to manipulate the screwdriver. Working with the horizontal cross-braces to secure the power supply and its mounting bracket was easier, as those used Philips dome-head screws instead of those pesky hexes.
After that, we hooked up the front panel and PSU wires to the motherboard, and used the standard 19-pin USB 3.0 header connector for the front USB port. Little slack remained for some of the larger PSU connectors, so we might have done better to ignore the manual’s example and put the PSU on the bottom instead of the top. Instead, we squeezed most of the wires between the motherboard and PSU, since they didn’t have the flexibility to wrap around the bottom face of the motherboard despite our second motherboard remount. In the end, it all looked neat and clean with a little care, and we knew that much of the cable excess would soon be invisible behind the vertically mounted video card.
Then, we mounted the graphics card to the backplane, after using the just-flexible-enough PCIe x16 riser from the GPU kit to bridge the gulf between motherboard and card. We filled the gap in the back-panel expansion card slot with one of the included slot covers, though it fit more loosely than we might have liked.
Finally, we installed the tempered-glass panels easily, with the side labeled “TEMPERED” on the bottom. The magnets did indeed hold them in place securely. (As mentioned, Streacom recommends removing the panels before transporting the DA2.)
All told, the ease of manipulating the case, the flexibility of the rail system, and the rounded design of the edges together made navigating the quirks of this case a pain-free process. (If you read the manuals first, that is. And you should; they are very good manuals.)
The Royal Road to mini-ITX
The DA2 is a rare breed of mini-ITX case that synthesizes clear, clean aesthetics with ease of build, installation flexibility, and impeccable machining and materials. Streacom’s array of luxe accessories for the chassis adds to the appeal and, indeed, makes up a large part of why this case stands out. (The vertical GPU implementation looked stunning through the side glass, we must say.)
We’d have liked a version of the case that came with the glass sides as standard issue, so we wouldn’t have to pay for and then ditch the pair of well-machined metal side panels that come in the box, but that’s a minor quibble. If you are willing to foot the bill for the full kit, you will not be disappointed. Just don’t rush the build.
Is the DA2 cheap? Not by a long shot. Is it worth it? As a keeper case that you’ll use for mini-ITX builds for years to come, absolutely. Simply put: Highly recommended.
