Thermaltake Armor A90 Review - PAGE 3

The Interior:

One of the most important parts of a case is the airflow it provides. The hardware that is responsible for the airflow are the intake and exhaust fans. It's debatable which fans are most important, so it's hard to decide which to look at first. Due to the way I sorted my pictures the rear exhaust fan will be the first one we take a look at. This is a 120mm fan rated at 1000RPM and 16dBA.

The remaining two included fans are the front intake fan, and the rear exhaust fan. The front intake fan is another 120mm fan rated at 1000RPM and 16dBA, however, this fan is equipped with blue LEDs. The top exhaust fan is a slightly larger 200mm fan rated at 800RPM and 15dBA, this fan is also equipped with blue LEDs.

The Thermaltake Armor A90 came with three fans included, so this means the fans will need to have some source of power. Lucky for us, they do! Two of the fans, the front intake and top exhaust, will get their power via Molex connectors. The third fan, the rear exhaust, will get its' power via a three pin connector which will plug into your motherboard. Why only one of the three fans would have this, I have no idea.

Speaking of things plugging into the motherboard, let's take a look at what wires we'll be.., well.., plugging into the motherboard. In order for those four USB ports on the case to work, we'll need to plug in the two USB connectors to the motherboard. The E-Sata port will work in a similar way, only we'll be attaching a SATA cable to our motherboard. The HD audio ports will also need to be attached to the motherboard via their cable. Last but not least are the front header connections. These are of course the HDD LED, the power LED, the power switch, and the reset switch.

Now let's take a look at the Thermaltake Armor A90's HDD brackets. Like we see on many cases, the Armor A90 utilizes a tool-less design. Simply move the tab on the bracket to the right and lift up. Install the drive, then push the bracket down and move the tab to the left. This should secure your HDD's in place, however I was extraordinarily disappointed with the amount of "Securing" going on. Normally I would not have discovered what I'm considering a flaw in a manner such as this. However, due to certain circumstances I needed to ship this case, with my hardware installed, to another destination in order to finish it's review. I received the Thermaltake Armor A90, with my hardware inside, and in terror. Not one, not two, but all three of the HDD's I installed had become dismounted. Not only that, but judging by the dents and scratches on the drives, they had bounced around for the better part of the trip. Luckily no severe damage was caused. In fact the only piece of hardware that was damaged was, ironically, my backup drive. I have transported and shipped computers, both with and without tool-less designs, and have never before encountered this problem. This should not happen, and if a manufacturer decides to create tool-less parts, they need to make sure it secures the hardware it's meant to secure. I have nothing against Thermaltake, and I'm in fact very fond of their cases. I will however recommend, that if you purchase this case, don't put your trust in the tool-less HDD bays. For your harddrives safety please screw them into place.

Next up are the ODD bays. These bays use the same tool-less design as the HDD bays, only the brackets are slightly larger. Another difference between the two, is that the ODD brackets actually secured the Optical Drives I installed. That's right, the Optical Drives remained nice and snug in the case through the entire trip.

The final two things we'll look at are, of course, the included bag of screws and the hole in the motherboard tray. Inside the bag of screws are standoffs, screws for your PSU, screws for your motherboard, and a bunch of other screws for different pieces of hardware. The hole in the motherboard tray, is actually very useful. What this allows you to do is install a cooler with a bracket, without having to remove the motherboard. You can simply remove both side panels, place the bracket on one side, and the cooler on the other. This makes installing after market coolers a lot easier!

Now let's get everything put together!