Meet the Thermaltake Armor full tower computer case. Although this style of case is also available in a mid-tower size, the person for which this computer is being built wanted to have plenty of expansion room. Full towers have two to three extra inches from top to bottom and from front to back than mid-tower cases. There is not much, if any, difference in side to side dimensions. This aluminum case makes an impressive sight even though the full tower case isn't twice the size of a mid-tower case, as one might expect. The Armor will never be classed as a "beige box".
The side panel window and the brushed aluminum front doors aren't the only features of this case that have been borrowed from the case "modding" community. The top has what case modders refer to as a "blow hole". The idea being that since heat rises cutting a hole in the top and mounting an exhaust fan there should help reduce heat inside the case. This "blow hole" does double duty. The hatch indicated by the arrow covers USB, Firewire and audio connections. This "blow hole" is large enough to allow heat exhaust without the use of a fan. If one did manage to pack enough stuff on the inside to restrict air flow, there are provisions for mounting a 90mm exhaust fan. The only drawback to this feature is the reduction in stuff stacking room, since the computer top is no longer an entirely flat surface and blocking the "blow hole" would defeat its purpose.
The power supply that was chosen for this unit is the same model as used in the black Antec case shown on a previous page. As there is already a couple of pictures of this PSU on that page, we opted for a close up of the modular design of this supply. The bundle of wires in the top left corner go to the main motherboard 20/24 pin connector. As every mother board requires this connector, there wouldn't be any benefit to modularizing this connection. This feature helps reduce wire clutter and increase air flow through the case. Like most quality power supplies this PSU has an intake and an exhaust fan.
As the title suggests, this computer is using ATI's Crossfire dual video card solution. The main board is an Asus M2R32-MVP with an AMD Athlon64 X2 5600+ CPU. This picture provides a good view of the memory bank filled with four ATI certified for Crossfire and manufactured by OCZ PC2-6400 RAM modules for a total of 4 Gb. The red colored material on these double sided 800 mhz. sticks are heat sinks/spreaders.
This front view provides a better overall look at the main board as the RAM and CPU dominate the foreground in the previous view. Notice that there is only one IDE connector but a connector for a floppy drive is still present. A rear view of this main board would reveal that the LPT/parallel port is also missing and in its place is a connection for an external SATA device. The missing LPT port seems to be a trend, however, with newer printers using USB ports this trend makes sense. Retaining the floppy drive controller and dropping the secondary IDE is a debatable issue, since USB Flash Drives have become not only inexpensive but quite large in capacity.
A close up view of the video card, a Gigabyte model GVRX13P256DERH using the Radeon X1300 Pro chipset, shows heat pipe technology in use. This card was installed to get the machine going and will be replaced with suitable CrossFire certified cards. As you can see, this type of video card uses two expansion slots and covers up a PCI-E X1 slot as well as the audio connector for the onboard sound feature. Neither is a terrible loss as this machine has a Creative X-Fi Xtreme Audio card, visible toward the bottom of the case installed and not much is readily available for PCI-Express X1 slots. With two expansion slots per card, installing another video card will cover up one of the two available standard PCI slots. This configuration resulted in a 4.2 Windows Experience rating. Crossfire drivers are already available and once the replacement cards arrive we will find out how they fare compared to SLI drivers, which at this time still do not function properly with Vista.
Although the top mounted audio, USB, IEEE 1394a and front panel connections prevented keeping all the wires hidden, these wires were long enough to enable them to be tied to one side to allow unrestricted air flow through the case. At this point, it isn't apparent how the view through the side window is going to look. A little extra length in the cables for the USB, audio and IEEE 1394 connectors would have made the job easier. There was, however, more than sufficient length for the front panel connectors to keep those cables mostly out of sight.
Nearly done, this is what this computer looks like with the doors opened and closed.
Unfortunately, the pics didn't turn out to be the same size probably due to some
sloppy cropping on my part. Even so, there is no doubt that this is a very handsome
case. Also there are views of this computer without a flash to show off the internal
lighting.
While in the process of moving files and settings from the computer this one is replacing,
we discovered hardware manufacturers aren't the only ones that have been dragging their
feet. Software providers are just as guilty. Incredimail, a popular e-mail client
has not released a Vista compatible version as yet. Yahoo Messenger, while being
compatible, is still in the process of revamping this popular IM client for Vista.
Once its certain there will be no more file transfers, then the other optical drive can be moved into the new case. It is a good idea to take plenty of time for the transfer process because you never know what problems you might run into. This particular instance presented the problem of the Windows Easy File and Settings Transfer Wizard refusing to run on the old computer. In this case, USB flash drives sure came in handy.
Loaded down but still not full, this unit now has two optical drives and four SATA hard drives. There are still three 5.25 inch drive bays in front and four 3.5 inch drive bays in the rear of the case. The mother board connections for drives, on the other hand, have all been used except the rear mounted SATA port.
Microsoft, Microsoft Office, Windows, Windows XP and Windows Vista are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Other names have been included in the above text that are trademarks of the respective companies.
