Date: June 9th, 2009
Article by: Joe Anderson (Hardware Reviewer)
Edited By: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by: Thermaltake USA
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PRODUCT INSTALLATION AND TESTING
The optical drives and expansion cards are secured with screws in the conventional manner and, with the PSU bracket installed, the component installation is complete. Given the excellent interior design, a very tidy installation can be accomplished with minimum effort.
There are also a couple of security features on the rear panel. To prevent peripheral theft, a small bracket captures the keyboard and mouse cables and is secured by a screw from inside the case, and a padlock loop to protect the interior of the case from unauthorized access. Time to button up this case and do some testing.
While this case does a pretty good job of keeping this high-watt hardware happy, I frankly expected a bit better cooling performance out of it. Here is a table illustrating the temperature change relative to the open test bed, in degrees C. Ambient temps were kept at a constant 21C in the lab and the system was shut down for one hour between test runs.
As you can see, this case does a fairly good job of keeping temperatures in check. There is clearly air moving in through the front over the hard drive and CPU numbers are really quite good. As I feared, there is clearly a dead spot in the graphics area due, I suspect, to the airflow impedance of the HDD cage and front fan. Moving the front intake fan to the upper placement, or adding another fan here, may help cooling here a bit. Also the 230mm side panel fan version of this case would almost certainly improve cooling in this area. Nevertheless, the fans are very quiet and the red glow from the top fan isn't sharp enough to be very distracting. In fact, with the door shut, the case is extremely quiet.
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