Thermaltake's Xaser III Skull Series - A Case For the Tough Guy
by Purav Sanghani on March 11, 2004 4:20 PM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
Expansion
The VM3000A was designed with a few things in mind. One of these is expandability. Hidden behind the front bezel are six 5-1/4" drive bays and four 3-1/2" bays. Since the top bay is used for the included instrument panel, five of the 5-1/4" drive bays remain to be utilized. There is a spot for a floppy drive and three 3.5" hard drives below that at middle height of the case's front end. The last three 5-1/4" bays are at the lower section. Another area where a hard drive can be mounted is the swing bar, which is new to this model. A spare drive can be mounted with screws via 4 holes. Being a desktop case, five 5-1/4" drive bays sounds excessive since 2-3 at most are used in a typical desktop rig. Instead, converting the lower 3 bays to 3-1/2" would make more sense, especially since hard drives are still the standard medium for storage.
Click to enlarge.
The swing bar also has a device that prevents the add-on cards from popping out of their slots. The casing that holds the 80mm fan in place also has 7 clips that, when the swing bar is in the closed position on the frame, holds full width add-on cards in place. Tiny features like this can help reduce many hardware problems.
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KristopherKubicki - Thursday, March 11, 2004 - link
Purav has been with us for a couple years, but this is his pilot review :) Congrats Purav - much better than my pilot ;)Kristopher
CZroe - Thursday, March 11, 2004 - link
"The Thermaltake Xaser III VM3000A's main feature is its completely screw-less design. Though it can be difficult to deal with some screw-less features, such as drive mounting rails, Thermaltake has done a great job with the design and construction of its chassis."Umm, I must know: Is it as "great" a job as the ThermalTake Xaser III chassis? I've already posted in the forums about it (See the URL below), but basically the chassis' screwless slot design prevented full-length PCI cards from being inserted even though the case had special slots to stabilize them (Full length PCI cards have a plastic handle which fits the slots).
There aren't enough pictures to tell if the case even has these slots, so I must ask :) Also, a better description of the "swing bar" is needed as well as an image. I'm still confused as to how it can stabilize a PCI card...
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=...
klah - Thursday, March 11, 2004 - link
Hey Purav, have any pictures of the interior with all of the components installed?sandorski - Thursday, March 11, 2004 - link
I got 1 of these cases 3 weeks ago, I really like it. The flashing light is kinda hokey, but overall the screwless design and appearance of the case really impress me. The case looks and feels solid.The review was entirely correct about installing the power supply, it is very difficult if the mobo, cpu, and cpu hs/fa is installed. I managed to get my old noisy 350watt Enermax in, but only after removing the rear fan shroud first.
tfranzese - Thursday, March 11, 2004 - link
Near identical to this SilverStone I looked at, but I dig the SST's looks far more. Anywho, I just wonder if the design flaws were fixed.Case I'm referring to is here: http://www.soundcardcentral.com/reviews/cases/sst-...