This is a good mid-tower case for the mainstream user, built with cooling in mind. All covers on the front panel are meshed, it features two 120-mm fans (one on the rear and one on the front, attached to the hard disk drive cage) and a side duct. The exorbitant number of 5 ¼” bays – nine – makes us believe that this case is particularly targeted to users that want to install a water-cooling solution based on 5 ¼” bays, like BigWater 780e and BigWater 760i, also from Thermaltake.
A good thing about this case is that it uses a screwless mechanisms to hold your PC daughter boards and to fasten 5 ¼” disk drives, the hard disk drive cage and the 5 ¼” to 3 ½” adaptor to the case. You, however, will need screws to install hard disk drives and floppy disk drives to this case.
This, however, isn’t a “perfect” product, even for the mainstream user. The first down side is that it isn’t in fact a completely screwless case, as mentioned above. Also, the fans used don’t have speed control (even though they already spin at a somewhat low speed it is always nice to have this feature) and since they don’t use a small 3-pin power connector you can’t monitor their speed thru your computer.
Even though the number of hard disk drive bays is more than enough for the mainstream user, high-end users will have trouble. If you have four hard disk drives – which isn’t an uncommon configuration for a hard core gamer – you won’t be able to install a floppy disk drive. And if you have more than four hard drives you will simply need to find a different product.
The absence of an eSATA port – a feature that is becoming more and more common, even for mainstream users – and the absence of any kind of suspension mechanism to reduce the noise produced by hard disk drives (feature present on mainstream products from other manufacturers like Antec) are other down sides of this product.
We honestly think that it would be a more appealing product if it came with two hard disk drive cages instead of just one. Users with less than four hard drives could simply remove this second cage to reduce noise (by removing the second frontal fan this cage would introduce), or simply keep it if they wanted a second frontal 120-mm fan.
It is a good product – if you know its limitations. For the exigent user, however, we believe that there are better products around. For example, mainstream mini-tower products from Antec cost the same thing or less and come already with a good power supply installed (keep in mind, however, that this comparison is a little bit flawed as we are comparing a mini-tower to a mid-tower case).
