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Thermaltake Tai Chi Case Review - PAGE 4
Andy Zen - Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005

The front

The fold out design looks a lot slicker than the one from the Armor, and actually seems to cover something now, whereas the Armor doors didn't do much at all.

In general, the front panel is quite similar to the one on the Thermaltake Armor. Like the Armor, it has the drawer and the moveable power/reset button bay.

However, there has been two changes made to the case - there is now a dedicated 3.5 inch hard drive bay with a 120 mm fan sticking out the front. Also, the dust grills have been removed in favor of straight up metal bay covers.

The Back

Like the Aurora, the Tai Chi has made space for Watercooling pipes, and like Gigabyte, Thermaltake has made a custom-designed watercooling option specifically for this case. It will add about $100 if you want it, but it's a nice and simple solution for you if you do wish to get it.

As you can also see, the power supply is in its normal horizontal position, which also means that the extra drive bays that were available on the Armor have been removed, which means fewer hard drive mounts available.

Also, the entire back panel can be changed to suit BTX (and there is more BTX support inside), but that is another package which will have to be purchased separately. Our review sample does not have the mod or the watercooling system, so we are unable to show you these.

The inside

See that black thing inside? Yup, that really is a removable motherboard tray. It's been a very long time since anybody decided that having a removable motherboard tray would be useful. Many (well, a few) years ago, practically all the top cases had it - if it didn't, that was one strike against the case. Perhaps this marks the return of trays again, at least for really expensive cases like this.

Minus the obligatory rant against the multitude of cables hanging from the top, the inside is quite good, with finished sheets of metal and rolled off edges.

next: Installation »

Article Index

1.Introduction
2.Specifications
3.Observations
4.Observations 2
5.Installation
6.Conclusion

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