Installation and Operation:
The images below show the Thermaltake Armor case with the standard windowed side panel, as well as with the 25cm fan version of the side panel. The styling is identical, except for the fact that one window pane has been reduced and resized to accommodate the fan. As far as aesthetics go, if you like the original design of the Armor, you should have no problem with the looks of this upgrade.
 
One issue with the installation came about due to the extremely tall CPU cooler used in this system. The Tuniq Tower 120 has a total height of about 155mm, making it the tallest I have used. Its cooling performance has made it my main choice for the past year or so, and so far the size hasn't been a problem... Until it met this side panel.
The 25cm fan's frame actually presses down on top of the cooler just a little bit. The interference is probably just a matter of a few millimeters, and with minimal effort I was able to get the case side to latch shut anyway. The orientation of the CPU cooler, or perhaps just the large black plate on top of it, was also of concern to me. As you can see in the images above, a decent portion of the 25cm fan is blinded off by this cooler. CPU coolers with the fan oriented parallel to the board may work far better than something like the Tuniq Tower 120, but we'll see what testing indicates.
With the system powered up, there was no noise or other indication that the slight interference would be a problem, so I continued on with testing the cooling capabilities of the side panel fan.
Testing consisted of monitoring an Intel Pentium D-840's thermal output while at idle and under a heavy load. Idle conditions were established by allowing the test system to sit at the Windows XP Professional desktop for a period of no less than one hour. The load conditions were generated by running two instances of Folding@Home, configured to take advantage of the dual cores on the Intel D-840 processor, for a period of 2 hours. ABIT's Guru utility software was used for monitoring the processor's temperature, and a thermometer was used to monitor the ambient temperature.
The chart below summarizes the results with the standard side panel as well as the side panel with the 25cm fan.
As you can see, the 25cm fan provided a drop of 4 degrees Celsius while under a full load, which doesn't sound like much, but it really is. The Tuniq Tower 120 cooler does about the best job of any cooler I have used, and for it to silently be able to cool 4 degrees cooler is quite impressive. In operation the 25cm fan on the side panel was inaudible, unless I happened to get right down next to it.
Considering the interference with the CPU cooler and the blinding off of one portion of the fan, the results were quite good. My feeling is that CPU coolers other than something like the Tuniq Tower may see even more of an improvement if they work with the fan's flow, and not against it. Another factor that could contribute to even better performance is the ambient conditions. At 26C, the room was rather warm, so that big fan was just dumping in more air at just 2Ce less than what the CPU was operating at. If you are able to move cooler air with that big fan, the performance will without a doubt improve.
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