Thermaltake Armor+ ESA Case Review

Introduction (Cont’d)

On Figures 5 and 6 you can see the top panel from this case, which has two meshes. The one located at the rear part is used to help to dissipate the heat from the power supply. Since on this case the power supply is installed on the top portion of the case, there is no space for the installation of a fan between this mesh and the power supply. But you can install a 120 mm fan below the other mesh, which is located at the middle of the top panel.

On the front part of the top panel there is a sliding door. Below this door you can find a small storage compartment. If you decide to install a liquid cooling solution that is installed on 5.25” bays like Bigwater 780e, you will need to remove this compartment in order to have access to the water tank. In this case you will also need to move the ESA control circuit that comes installed on the upper-most 5.25” bay to a lower bay, since the water cooler will need to be installed on the upper-most bays.

This sliding door, however, has a lousy quality, at least on the sample we got. It would get out of place whenever we tried to fully open it and we would waste a lot of time trying to put it back in its rail. This is another point we hope Thermaltake fixes before releasing this product.

Figure 5: Top panel.

Figure 6: Storage compartment, buttons and connectors found on the top panel.

On the top panel you can find the power and reset switches, one FireWire port, four USB ports, one eSATA port and microphone input and headphones output. The amount of connectors available on this case is just perfect.

On the bottom panel, shown in Figure 7, we have the air intake for the two optional 120- or 140 mm fans or the two bottom hard disk drives (more about this later). Here you will find the thumbscrews used to hold the bottom hard disk drive modules.

Figure 7: Bottom panel.

Finally we have the rear panel in Figure 8. As we have already explained, this case has ten slots for expansion cards and not only seven like regular cases, including full tower models. Because of this feature this case is categorized as a “super tower” case. Ten slots allow you to install extended ATX motherboards and also up to four video cards. If you have a motherboard that accepts four video cards and you have four double-slot video cards then you need a case with at least eight slots. The funny thing is that so far the only platform accepting four video cards is CrossFireX from AMD/ATI and this case is targeted to NVIDIA-based motherboards, since it supports ESA monitoring technology.

On the rear panel you can also see a 120 mm fan –you can control its speed through ESA software, if you use an NVIDIA-based motherboard – and two holes on the top left side that can be opened if you use an external water cooling system or a water cooling system that uses an external radiator.

On this panel you can also see a handle on the left side. This handle is used to remove the motherboard tray, as we will explain later.

This case uses thumbscrews to hold the side panels to its body and the left side panel (the one you need to open to build your PC) can be locked with a key that comes with the product (see the key on the right side from Figure 8).

Figure 8: Rear panel.