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| ThermalTake Soprano DX Black Midi Tower Review |
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For a long time ThermalTake have been making good looking and well
designed PC cases aimed at the gamer and enthusiast sections of the market. Today we look at the Soprano DX and see if it continues their tradition.
The Soprano DX:
The Soprano DX retails for around AU$180 without a power supply, quite a reasonable price for what you get. The main chassis is constructed from normal steel, meaning the price is kept low but the weight suffers few kilogram penalty, weighing in at 10.5kg, quite a bit more than equivalent sized aluminium competitors, but substantially cheaper. The front panel/door is anodized black brushed aluminium and gives the case a very sleek appearance.
The front panel is kept shut through two small magnetic contacts, so there are no clips to break and only a light touch required to open and close, a lock is also included on the side of the door to ensure unwanted guests are kept at bay.
Also on the front panel is a blue “bubble light” stick hidden behind the top aluminium fold to give a luminescent yet not overpowering blow glow to the front of the case.
Open the door and we find 4 x 5.25” drive bays above 2 x 3.5” drive bays, so there are plenty of externally accessible drive bays. Below the drive bays is an air intake that looks exactly like an air conditioning duct you’d find in your office roof and really doesn’t match the smooth lines of the rest of the case.
The plastic front panel behind the main door can be easily opened as well to assist with installation of optical drives and to give you access to the washable mesh air filter in front of the large 14cm front intake fan. The inclusion of a filter on cases like these is always a welcome addition, helping to keep dust from piling up in all your internal cooling fans and on all of your components.
There are no I/O ports on the front of the case, instead these are kept in a little hatch on the top of the case, included are USB, Audio and an eSATA port instead of the usual Firewire port. An interesting inclusion and given the rising popularity of eSATA drives it’s sure to be a useful one.
The back of the Soprano DX is nothing special, looks much like every other case on the market. There is a 12cm Blue LED exhaust fan included on the rear with a reasonable open grill so airflow should be impaired too much. Sadly both back and front fans in the Soprano don’t connect to the motherboard and as such their speed cannot be monitored, they both connect with standard Molex power connectors. As standard there is no power supply is included with the DX, but any standard size ATX power supply will fit without a worry.
The Soprano DX includes a Perspex window side panel as standard, with an 8cm vent cut out of the window to assist CPU cooling, although a fan can’t be put in this place without doing a dodgy job to fit it there. The panel itself is held to the case with two sliding clips, and secured by two thumb screws, so it’s nice and easy to remove for internal access.
Inside the case we have room for a full size 12” x 9.6” ATX motherboard and enough room for 8800 series graphics cards. All expansion cards are held in place without screws, just plastic tabs which makes any installation nice and easy.
In front of the motherboard area, below the already mentioned externally accessible drive bays, is a drive cage for 6 hard drives. Included on this drive cage are rubber anti-vibration grommets for mounting the drives (special screws are included of course) in an effort to keep any vibration noise to a minimum. The main intake fan for the case is right in front of the hard drive cage so high hard drive temperatures should never be a problem. The cage is held in with one thumbscrew down low and a simple clip up high, so when your case is packed with other components such as long video cards and cabling going everywhere, you can remove the whole drive cage easily out the side to install a new hard drive.
All the externally accessible drive bays have screw-less drive installation with the option of using normal screws as well if you want to ensure they are secured properly, a good idea if the case is going to be travelling or shipped somewhere as the screw-less mounts don’t seem to be *that* secure, but fine for a computer that will only sit under your desk and never move.
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Conclusion:
A very well constructed and certainly good looking case with reasonable cooling and lots of drive expansion capability. Many components are able to be installed without the need for a screwdriver but I’d recommend screwing in your optical drives if you’re going to move the case around. Selling for only AU$182 you get quite a lot of case for your money, so if you’re into making a good looking high-end PC, you should thoroughly consider this case for your project.
OzHardware Rating – 8.5/10
This product can be purchased online at www.techbuy.com.au
Direct Link - http://www.techbuy.com.au/p/71508/.asp
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