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Thermaltake Modern Life Style XaserV Series- Damier V5000A
Date: Monday, March 17, 2004
Author: Joe Di Figlia
Provided By: Thermaltake
Page: 5 of 6
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After you decide to rip the door out of the way, you can let the fun begin. Most of the guts are pretty standard with only a few exceptions. They tried to make the case tool-less so you will find it's very easy to populate the case with components. Your 5.25" and 3.5" drives all use plastic rails for quick installation. Something that I like is the fact that they give you little trays to keep your rails in so people like me don't lose them. I like the fact they do this for you, but I would much rather have seen them take up a 5.25" bay as most people use more then just one hard drive and the extra space would come in handy.
 
When you start populating this case with your components you will discover extremely fast that it becomes hard to keep things clean looking. I said before that this case is very busy. Once you start hooking everything up, the 5 fans, the LCD display, the fan controllers, and your drives, you will start ripping your hair out from frustrations. I can't stand a "messy" case, and there seems to be no possible way of avoiding that in this case. Not to mention how complicated it can get trying to hook up the fans to all the controllers. I went through the process 3 times before I got it right, because of the number of connections that must be made. When I say there is a rat's nest of wires; that might be considered an understatement. Had it not been for the instructions, I would have ripped the fan controllers out and replaced them with a standard rheobus.
 
It is easy to see that Tt is trying some cool things here. Most motherboard installations require you to screw the board in place. In this case you can use the "push pin" idea for installing it. This is a neat idea, but I would still prefer to screw the motherboard down. I bent more than one of the pins trying to get them secure. One thing that confused me was that Tt sent the case with 4 standard motherboard mounts that require screws and the rest of the installation is with these pushpins. I would think a manufacturer would make it all or none. Following their tool-less approach, even the PCI and AGP slots can have cards installed without the normally required screws.
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