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Thermaltake ISGC-300

Nathan Edwards — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:30:00 -0500

Kind to the ears, deadly to heat

Everyone and their CPU-cooler-manufacturing mother are jumping aboard the skyscraper-formfactor bandwagon, hoping to match the performance of Thermalright’s Ultra-120 eXtreme and Noctua’s NH-U12P air coolers. Last month we tested Zalman’s attempt, and this month we have Thermaltake’s answer, the ISGC-300, one of a series of four ISGC-branded air coolers recently released into the wild. Thermaltake’s creative relationship with the English language is responsible for the ISGC moniker, which stands for “Inspiration of Silent Gaming Cooling.”

The ISGC-300 consists of a copper heat exchanger with four heat pipes running into a tower of 33 saw-toothed fins. At 6.24 inches high by five inches wide by 2.8 inches deep, it’s slightly shorter and narrower than Thermalright’s Ultra-120, but about a quarter-inch deeper. A 12cm white Thermaltake hydrodynamic-bearing fan is held onto the front using metal clips in a manner reminiscent of the Noctua NH-U12P. The nine-bladed fan is quiet and includes a variable-speed switch in lieu of a four-pin PVM connector. At its quietest, it’s nearly silent; at its loudest, it’s still damned quiet.

The now-familiar formfactor of Thermaltake's ISGC-300 brings the cooling prowess we've come to expect.

Unlike most of the coolers we’ve reviewed recently, with their backplates, finicky spring screws, and wobbly mounting brackets, the ISGC is pretty painless to install. You screw the mounting brackets onto the bottom of the cooler, then secure them to the motherboard with nuts and washers—no backplate or long-handled screwdriver required, although if your motherboard tray doesn’t have a cutout for the CPU, you’ll have to remove your motherboard for the install. The lack of a backplate, which provides stability, could be an issue if you plan to ship the box a long distance. But frankly, we’ve had no problems with far larger heatsinks that lack backplates. Like most coolers of this style and size, you may have to mount the heatsink so it’s parallel with your RAM, as mounting the other way may bump into RAM cooling fins.

At its highest fan speed, the ISGC cool to within a few degrees of our champion air cooler, Thermalright’s U120-eXtreme. The ISGC-300 cooled an idling CPU to within a half-degree Celsius of the Thermalright, and at full burn the ISGC’s temps were less than two degrees Celsius higher than the Thermalright’s. Thermaltake has taken a step in the right direction with the ISGC-300, with its relatively easy install, competitive price, near-silent operation, and performance that comes close to the category leader.

Exclusive: Thermaltake's Jaw-Dropping Level 10 Chassis Unboxed!

Nathan Edwards — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 09:00:00 -0500

Earlier this year, Thermaltake wowed us all with the announcement of the Level 10, a concept case designed in conjunction with BMW DesignWorks. Rather than a standard aluminum box, the Thermaltake Level 10 would incorporate a central pillar, with individual compartments hanging from it for the motherboard, PSU, optical drives, and hard drives. Here's a press shot of the Level 10.

The Level 10. It's high-concept! (click to embiggen)

We haven't heard much about the Level 10 since Computex in June; we were even a bit skeptical that such an outré case would ever come to market. But Friday morning we strolled into our secret lair to find an enormous box on our doorstep. After a hasty unboxing (documented on Page 2), we found a Level 10 of our very own, which we promptly shipped upstairs to our in-house photographers.

The Thermaltake Level 10 in all its glory.

As you can see, the production Level 10 is nearly identical to the concept shots we've seen earlier. Each compartment on the Level 10 has its own ventilation. The large panels on the lower left cover the motherboard mount, PCI-E cards, GPUs, and so forth. The six slots on the right are hot-swap SATA bays, connected to a large vertical heatsink. The bays have mounts for 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch drives. The top right box holds three optical drives, and the upper left box holds the power supply.

We didn't have time to hook up all the lights, but the Level 10 includes a red LED strip that runs from the case's front panel across the top and to the rear, as well as red LED intake and exhaust fans in the motherboard compartment. Each of the six SATA hard drive bays includes a red LED that lights when the bay is occupied (we stuck a hard drive in the top one to show how it works).

The Level 10 with power supply, motherboard, optical drive, and three hard drive bays open.

The locks on the rear panel keep the component bays secure.
The upper right lock secures the PSU and motherboard compartments,
while the left locks the hard drive trays and optical drive bays.

Next: The gut shot, plus the initial unboxing of the Level 10!

The guts of the Level 10: individual compartments keep components thermally isolated. And it looks wicked.

The right side panel on the Level 10 comes off for access to the rear of the motherboard tray, just like on a standard case. Note the holes for cable routing as well as the backplane cutout for installing CPU coolers.

Now, step back with us in time as we show our initial unboxing of the Level 10, and give our first impressions of the case. Plus a bonus game: spot the cool stuff in our lab!

The Level 10 shipped in a 66lb box, fresh from the factory in Taipei.

In the top of the box was a nifty design book.

When unboxing heavy components, it's best to lay the box on the side.
The Level 10 came well-protected.

At this point we started humming Also Sprach Zarathustra (aka the 2001: Space Odyssey theme)

Dun DUNNNNN!

The panels seem a tad saggy but sturdy when secured.

Here's the Level 10 with the rear panel removed.

The front-panel connectors include your standard 4 USB 2.0 ports, one eSATA port, and standard audio jacks.The case fits standard ATX and micro-ATX boards. The motherboard tray is thankfully removable: we wouldn't want to install a board in a case you can't lay on its side. We dig the hard drive trays that light up when they contain a drive, and we especially dig that they can hold either 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch drives without additional hardware. We're not as keen on the back panel- specifically, how difficult it can be to put the panel back on; you sometimes have to fiddle with the hard drive locking mechanism before it will go back on.

One thing that might not come across in the pictures: the Level 10 is huge. It's 12.5 inches wide, two feet deep, and 26.2 inches high, and weighs over 47 pounds. The carrying handle on the top will definitely come in handy; we doubt any of the component bays can hold the whole weight of the case if you try to lift from them.

The Thermaltake Level 10 is stylish as hell, but how well will it work as a case? We'll find out! Look for our full review on MaximumPC.com in the next few weeks! The Level 10 will be available in mid-October for $700. For more information, check out the official product page and stay tuned to MaximumPC.com!

Thermaltake Element S

Nathan Edwards — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 17:45:43 -0500

An array of thoughtful features in an understated design

Say you’re a content creator—video, graphic design, whatever. You want a computer that’s quiet, functional, and hopefully doesn’t look like it was designed by a candy raver, or worse, Apple. That’s what Thermaltake is betting on with its Element S, an understated black midtower case with restrained red accents and plenty of drive space that’s marketed toward content creators.

The Element S is built from steel, painted black inside and out, and decked with black plastic trim on the top and a red-rimmed, black-plastic front-panel door. It weighs close to 18 pounds, and measures 21.3x9.1x20 inches. The model we tested included three fans: a 12cm, 1,300rpm front intake fan, a 14cm 1,000rpm rear output fan, and a 23cm 800rpm red LED fan on top. The case also includes rear mounts for two 6cm VGA exhaust fans, which is rare, but makes sense if you’re encoding video using a high-end graphics card. The Element S also has two holes for water-cooling tubes, but doesn’t include rubber grommets in them—they’re just bare metal punchouts in the case that could puncture the tubing over time.

The Element S has three 5.25-inch bays and a seven-slot hard drive cage, the latter of which can be oriented so that the drives either sit parallel to the front of the case or perpendicular to it. Swapping the cage’s orientation involves removing a few thumbscrews, popping off the whole front panel, and temporarily removing the two front fan clips. Fortunately, the whole process takes just a few minutes. Mounting the drives with SATA ports facing the rear of the case improves airflow and makes connecting drives easy, but it makes the task of adding and removing drives slightly more difficult. The drives slide in and out on special thumbscrews, and lock in with a plastic clasp. Thankfully, Thermaltake includes enough of the screws to fill all seven drive bays.

Great news for fans of solid-state drives: The Element S includes mounts for two 2.5-inch drives, which is the kind of forward thinking we salute, and we wonder why it’s still so rare in case design. Even cases that ship with 3.5-inch-to-2.5-inch drive bay adapters are rare, much less designs that let you keep all your 3.5-inch drive bays free. And while the motherboard tray on the Element S isn’t removable, it at least features a backplate cutout for the CPU cooler.

Beyond its modest exterior lies a wealth of hard drive bays and bonus features.

The PSU mounts are slightly elevated to improve airflow for units with bottom-mounted fans; the front fan mounts feature clips so they can be swapped easily (or removed to switch the hard drive cage orientation), and the case’s front bezels act as dust filters. The Element S’s front panel connectors include audio in and out, two USB ports, and an eSATA port.

We wish the optical drive bays were toolless (as it is, they require the use of a couple screws), but no part of installation was actually difficult.

The Thermaltake Element S is a good midtower case at a competitive price—at $150, it’s $80 cheaper than the Silverstone Fortress, and $30 cheaper than Hiper’s Osiris. Both those cases, however, are made of pricier aluminum. Still, with plenty of drive bays and fans and not as much flash as most gaming chassis, the Element S strikes a more professional tone than more ornate cases, and offers a lot of substance in a grown-up case.

Thermaltake BigTyp 14 Pro

Nathan Edwards — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:00:00 -0500

It's big, mean, loud, and it doesn't play well with others, but it gets the job done

At five inches high, 6.14 inches square at the top, and weighing a few ounces shy of two pounds, the Thermaltake BigTyp 14 Pro is among the biggest and heaviest coolers we’ve tested—although it’s not as big as Cooler Master’s V10, reviewed last month.

The BigTyp 14 Pro contains six heat pipes routed through aluminum fins mounted perpendicular to the motherboard and is topped with a plastic shroud and 14cm variable-speed fan, which blows hot air straight down instead of through the back of the case, like with most performance coolers. Two retention clips screw into the base and are fastened with nuts on the underside of the motherboard, just like with the Cooler Master V10. Installing the BigTyp 14 Pro is easier than the V10—it’s smaller and lighter, it won’t bump up against crucial components like RAM, and the nuts can be screwed in with a Phillips screwdriver as opposed to a hex wrench. But there’s no room for a 12cm rear fan with the BigTyp installed.

The Thermaltake BigTyp 14 Pro is big enough to cause problems with some cases.

The support brace that reinforces our Cooler Master ATCS 840’s removable motherboard tray and backplate got in the way of the BigTyp’s plastic shroud. We’re not sure who to blame for this: Cooler Master for putting a brace so close to the top left of the motherboard, or Thermaltake for creating such an enormous cooler? Regardless, the cooler should install fine in most other chassis. (We ended up Dremeling out a corner of the cooler’s shroud to make it fit.)

At low fan speeds, the BigTyp 14 Pro outperforms our stock cooler, and at top howling speeds it’s a match for our favorite, the Zalman CNPS 9900. But even at $20 cheaper than the Zalman, the BigTyp won’t be taking the top slot. It’s too big and it messes up internal airflow by requiring removal of the 12cm back fan and routing its hot air straight down onto the mobo instead of onto the back of the case.

Towers of Power: Five Full-Tower Enclosures Reviewed

Nathan Edwards — Tue, 12 May 2009 07:00:00 -0500

Ah, spring: when a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of upgrading. But, alas! Your fancy new videocard is too big for your tiny case, and you’re running out of hard drive bays for your RAID. Fear not! A classy full-tower chassis can be just the solution.

In this roundup we’ve collected five full-tower cases—big and tall enclosures with all the bells and whistles: new looks, toolless expansion slots, intake filters, drive bays aplenty, and more. Space-saving isn’t a priority here: The focus is on features, with room for as much hardware as you need to cram in. If you want a portable rig or something to nestle under your desk, these aren’t the cases for you. But if you’re looking to make the most of your computer, portability be damned, one of these beauts could be your huckleberry.

In evaluating these cases, we focused on a few key points: overall build quality, aesthetics, ease of installation, cooling options, convenience, and features like front-panel connectors. We kept price in mind, too, but only to a degree: After all, we’re Maximum PC. We don’t mind paying for excellence; we just object when gear is offensively overpriced.

They’re big and bold, but which of these full-tower enclosures will make the best abode for your PC?

The Reviews

Cooler Master ATCS 840

ABS Canyon 695

Silverstone Raven RV01

NZXT Zero II

Thermaltake Spedo

Final Thoughts

The Cooler Master 840’s killer combo of good looks and useful features wins the day, but every case has something to offer

At Maximum PC, we go through a lot of components. We build a lot of computers. We know what we like. So when we test a case, we ask a few important questions: How easy is installation? Does this case make our lives easier? Is this case likely to protect our precious components? And while we’re at it, does it look good?

The answers, for the Cooler Master ATCS 840, are yes, yes, yes, and yes. We were won over by the ease of installation, but more importantly the ease of swapping out parts. We love its style and the attention to detail—we can’t say enough good things about its removable motherboard tray and the CPU-cooler cutout.

But other cases here also deserve accolades: We love the Silverstone Raven’s looks, amenities, and innovative motherboard placement, the ABS Canyon 695’s design and SATA backplate, and the Thermaltake Spedo’s cable management features. And the NZXT Zero II is decent if you’re a modder looking for a good starting point.

Each case in this roundup had its drawbacks, too. The Canyon 695 is stupid expensive, while the Zero II is cheap in both senses of the word. We weren’t thrilled by the Spedo’s looks or the flimsiness of its thermal chamber panels. We could have used eSATA in the Raven. And we wish we hadn’t snapped the front-intake cover off of the ATCS 840 (oops).

If you can spare the $280, we’d say go for the Cooler Master ATCS 840. The CPU-cooler backplate cutout and sliding motherboard tray/rear panel alone are worth it for us; we plan on rebuilding our CPU-cooling test rig around it. But even if you’re not in the habit of swapping out CPU coolers regularly, the 840 brings more than enough to the table. Easy install, roomy interior, great looks, screwless drive bays (and plenty of ‘em), and scrupulous attention to detail: The 840 reminds us why we’ve liked so many Cooler Master full-towers in the past.

Wish List: Case Features We Long For

Man, do we love cases with thoughtful amenities. The NZXT Zero II is no slouch of a case, but it’s a Neanderthal compared to the Cooler Master ATCS 840, our favorite case in this roundup. But even the mighty 840 doesn’t have everything we want in a case. Here are a few features we’ve seen in some cases that should really be in all of them.

2.5-inch Drive Bays

With solid state drives making big strides, we see lots of system builders starting to include them as OS volumes. But few cases have dedicated 2.5-inch bays. Our last rig from Velocity Micro solved the problem by mounting its Intel X-25M on the IcePak from a WD Velociraptor. But an actual 2.5-inch bay (or at least an adapter, like that found in the NZXT Whisper), would be better.

Mid-Case Air Duct

A mid-case air duct, like that found in the Silverstone Temjin TJ10, brings cool air from outside into the case to cool the GPUs before exiting out the back. This helps keep other hot components from warming the air before it gets to the GPUs—a literal breath of fresh air for your videocards.

SATA Backplanes

The ABS Canyon 695 and the HP Blackbird are two of many cases that have started featuring SATA backplanes in their drive bays. Forget rails; forget cable routing. Just slap in a couple of hard drives and go. Bonus: Many of these backplanes support RAID and hot-swapping.

ETC.

While we’re at it, let’s make the following things mandatory: Intake fan dust filters, variable-speed fan controllers, a cable routing mechanism, toolless PCI slots, and quality thumbscrews.

Thermaltake Spedo

Nathan Edwards — Sun, 10 May 2009 20:33:56 -0500

Funny name. Good deal. Wonderful enclosure

Chunky plastic-and-mesh motif notwithstanding, Thermaltake’s Spedo is full of great features: Look at all those 5.25-inch bezels!

The Thermaltake Spedo is big and bold, with gray plastic trim and black honeycomb mesh running up the front of the case and the top plate. It sounds awkward, but it mostly works, just like the mishmash of features inside.

The Spedo packs a plethora of toolless HDD and optical drive bays.

The 21.1x24x9.1-inch Spedo starts strong with seven external 5.25-inch slots and two removable hard drive bays with three slots each, all completely screwless. Add in two low-rpm 23cm fans (one on top and one on the side), and six smaller, faster fans, including a red LED fan in front of one of the hard drive bays, and airflow is great.

If the “Advanced Thermal Chamber 3,” were really advanced, it wouldn’t feel so flimsy and frustrating to install.

The Spedo ships with an array of flimsy plastic panels billed as the “Advanced Thermal Chamber 3,” which separate the PSU area from the PCI cards from the CPU cooler. In our experience, removing and installing the panels is more trouble than it’s worth; after our initial install we just left them outside the case.

We like the Spedo’s cable-management panels. They even double as cable-hiding panels.

We do like the cable-management system behind the motherboard tray—it consists of a series of plastic plates that clip into the backplane. And we like the screwless PCI slots, too.

The Spedo is a good case with great build quality, but the chunky plastic-and-metal-mesh aesthetic isn’t for everyone.

<< Back to the Towers of Power Index

Thermaltake SpinQ

Nathan Edwards — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 15:00:00 -0500

At first glance, the Thermaltake SpinQ looks like nothing so much as a stack of bike gears with a fan mounted in the center. And that’s basically what it is—50 circular aluminum fins mounted around an 80mm fan connected to a copper exchanger. The cooler measures 4.8” wide by 3.54” deep by 5.98” high—about the same height and width as the Zalman CNPS9700LED, but a bit deeper. The SpinQ is, essentially, the high-rise counterpart to the horizontal sprawl of its stablemate, the Thermaltake DuOrb.

Unlike the DuOrb, with its two fans and jarring red-and-blue LED color scheme, the SpinQ keeps to one color, a soothing blue, and a single fan. And instead of the DuOrb’s retention system, which is sturdy but requires you to remove your motherboard, the SpinQ uses the same plastic mounting system as Intel’s stock coolers, so provided you don’t already have a retention plate from your previous cooler installed, all you have to do is snap the SpinQ onto the motherboard, tighten it, and go. Thermaltake definitely wins points for the SpinQ’s ease of installation.

The SpinQ comes with a controller knob that lets you change the fan’s speed from low, which is whisper-quiet, to its top speed, which sounds like a small jet engine, and every stop in between. It’s a handy feature—if you don’t mind reaching into your case, that is. It’s too bad that at its lowest setting the SpinQ barely outperforms our stock cooler. At its highest (and loudest), it knocked eight degrees from our quad core’s 100 percent burn temp—respectable, but not even close to the DuOrb’s numbers, which cooled 15 degrees below stock at 100 percent burn.

If your tastes run more to silver and blue than copper and red (and blue), the SpinQ is a clear winner on the design front. But it can’t match the performance of its sprawling, dual-fanned sibling.

Don’t get us wrong, the SpinQ is not a bad cooler. It’s got looks, a fairly standard formfactor (as opposed to the DuOrb’s expanse), and ease of installation in its favor, and its performance is nothing to scoff at. But in a fair fight, at 100 percent CPU utilization, it can’t match up with its sibling. Both coolers retail for $80, so unless you’re really cramped for horizontal space, you’re better off with the DuOrb.

Thermaltake M9 VI1000BNS

David Murphy — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 20:25:07 -0500

Thermaltake’s M9 chassis is a step up from the bottom rung of simplicity, but it’s nowhere near a top-of-the-line design. The case is structured as if Thermaltake took a plain-Jane chassis, improved a few features—like making the PCI and 5.25-inch bay holders screwless—stuck in a front-panel blue LED fan to appease gaming audiences, and called it a day. That might not sound so bad, but in actuality, the screwless PCI holders become this case’s Achilles’ heel. And the arrow? Any dual-slot videocard on the market.

Due to the notched nature of the PCI retention tabs, there is absolutely no way to fit a dual-slot videocard into your rig and still make use of the screwless functionality. You’d have to forcibly rip off the entire retention mechanism just to fit the card in—and that’s assuming you have the proper screws lying around to do that.

On the other hand, we like the screwless drive holders. The case gives you plenty of expansion room with its nine 5.25-inch forward bays, three of which serve as holders for hard drives. It’s just a tad annoying, however, that you still have to pop off the case’s entire front panel to stuff 5.25-inch devices into your system. Front-panel connectivity consists of just two USB ports and the standard audio jacks. The lack of additional connection options isn’t a critical omission, but it’s certainly not preferable.