The top 230-mm fan can be seen on Figure 4. Even though this fan is listed as being a 230-mm unit it uses 190-mm blades, making it to be on the same size of “smaller” fans, like the 200-mm fan used on Antec Twelve Hundred. It rotates at 800 rpm. The top panel has also a small storage compartment (which can be used to hold your MP3 player, for example), two USB ports and the traditional microphone input and headphones output. On this case the two USB ports are located far from each other, allowing you to install two “fat” USB devices at the same time.

The top fan and the other two fans use regular 4-pin peripheral power plugs, so they are connected directly to the power supply, not allowing you to monitor their speed thru your favorite monitoring program. Also no speed control is available for the fans.

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Figure 4: Top panel.

Unfortunately the top panel is fastened to the chassis using a very fragile mechanism, based on thin plastic latches. The sample we received for this review came with all latches broken and thus the top panel was completely loose. We think Thermaltake could make a better job here, using screws to fasten the top panel to the chassis. The stands where the screws would be screwed have to be thick. We say that because one of the parts that came broken was a thin stand that used a small screw to fasten the panel to the case.

On Figure 5 we have the rear panel. On this case the power supply is installed on the lower part of the case and thru the hole where the power supply must be installed you can see that there is a washable dust filter for power supplies that have a fan on their bottom, which is the most common configuration nowadays.

On the top part you can see the rear 120-mm fan and also two holes for external water cooling systems. These holes are protected by rubber covers, so you don’t need to break anything on V9 in order to use them.

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Figure 5: Rear panel.

Let’s now see how V9 looks like inside.