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Thermaltake Eclipse DV V6000 Series Review

Today we have the black Thermaltake Eclipse DV (also available in silver). The Eclipse DV is Thermaltake's newest entry into the home theatre case market (maybe) and is the offspring of Thermaltake's Eclipse mid-tower (vanilla) case. If you don't know what that looks like, here is the official link:

Original Eclipse

If you've clicked on the link, you'll notice that although the cases have front doors that look like the covers on a CD Hi-fi system, they are actually there just for aesthetics. In the original Eclipse, the front door can actually open up so you can store a CD on the front of your case. It's a built-in CD holder, with the look of a CD player. Needless to say, with a flaw like that, people with not enough things to complain about were up in arms over the deceptive look. Well, not really.

Thermaltake is a company that is known to incorporate user demands fairly quickly. In this case, they saw that some people actually wanted a case that could use the front CD feature as more than just a CD holder. So they went ahead and installed an actual CD-rom into the front door. To clear any confusion, the default optical drive installed is a notebook combo drive (CD burner/DVD-rom), which is enough to satisfy most users while keeping costs down. While I agree that a DVD burner would have been a nice feature, notebook DVD burners are notoriously slow, and considering this is a full desktop case instead of a half-sized Small Form Factor, it's not a big deal to install a full sized 5.25 desktop DVD burner. After all, you have four externally available bays to work with.

Specifications

The Eclipse DV is very light, which is not a surprise considering the case is made of aluminium. The front door is a machined block of aluminium. The heavy door makes the empty case tilt forward, something that you need to be care of when installing drives. Or you can install the motherboard and power supply first to balance the weight before installing the drives. I don't recall any other case that we've reviewed having this issue.