Thermaltake Tai-Chi Super Tower Chassis

**Doctor Feelgood**

There is so much room in the case you don't have to worry about whether or not everything is going to fit. In fact, the toughest part about the install was deciding exactly where I wanted my 5.25" drive bays to be installed in relation to the power switch. - The Review

kevlong · Rated PG Joined: 04 Nov 2005 Posts: 7

Just completed an install of this case with the following comments, (Note that I am an experienced system builder, but this is my first water cooled installation):
-The case is very heavy - reassuring when assembled but lifting it on and off the bench!! This is made all the harder trying to keep the front and back narrow doors closed and avoiding the front doors falling open when trying to lay the case down on its side. Further you can't have a narrow door fully open and the adjacent front door also fully open without them clashing and risking scratching
-Not all edges were smoothed
-Mixed success with thumbscrew fixing for HDD's. I had to resort to conventional screws about half of the time â€“ Tool free humbug!!
-Fixing the motherboard to the removable tray required some dexterity in both knowing which screws actually removed the tray and then trying to get the resulting assembly back in under the lugs - The article was also right in pointing out a small but annoying registration error of a couple of mm's resulting in a tight fit for the rear ports into the plate
-Water block - Fixing was quite easy once I knew the difference between the Mylar shim and the Insulator, (thanks Google)...and oh, should you actually stick the insulator to the motherboard?
-I didn't like the tool free catches for the rear slots, mostly because unless you had a completely standard card, the plastic clip would foul the top, e.g. on my XFX 78000GTX there is a top heat spreader that I had to remove before I could clamp the card down
-Special thanks to the article for the suggestion about longer lengths of water pipe it saved me from buying new pipe because I would have certainly made the same mistakes
Once assembled I used a separate PSU to run the water cooler to fill, get rid of bubbles and check for leaks. The machine an AMD 3800+ X2 runs 10C cooler than the previous stock HSF. In terms of sound I must have a defective front fan because it buzzes all the time, so I've disconnected it until I can find a quieter replacement.

Kevlong

Hellfire · Rated XXX Joined: 05 Aug 2003 Posts: 3473

Thanks for the feedback.

It is a bit of a pain to move around if you have it on a counter, mine is. It definetly is annoying about the front door and the narrow side panel door, hard to get things perfectly flush. Once it's all setup and running, it's not a problem, unless of course you have a tendancy to get into your case a lot (which I do constantly).

Odd about the edges, all of mine were smoothed, and didn't allow for any "accidental" cuts. Where were yours not smoothed? i want to verify that I didn't miss a spot.

Again, not sure about the issue you had with the thumbscrews. They worked perfectly for me

The rear tool-less clips remain the biggest sore point on about every case I've looked at. Most have one or two things that coudl be changed to make it really nice. These are nicer than most because they did take into account the various card heights, and widths. Unfortunately not all are the same or can be taken into account when manufacturing the slots. I personally would prefer a little "nipple" to go into the screw slot for stability, instead of the little bracket support.

Bummer about your front fan, it does sound like it might be a little faulty. Tried removing and reconnecting it? Could be one of the cables in the way.

kevlong · Rated PG Joined: 04 Nov 2005 Posts: 7

In fairness there were no killer edges just a few, up around the top of the case, (when trying to get the PSU fitted) that felt a little rough.
The screw situation - I don't know? I'm sure that you have a large collection of screws, nuts and bolts that you have accumulated over time - I just had a problem with a couple of my new HDD screw holes that only seemed to be satisfied by resorting to the above mentioned screw box!
On the fan front, I'm not happy with the noise from either the front or rear fans and I think I will replace them both in time.

I'll reiterate that once it was put together it is a good performing case with my CPU temps reduced by 10c over the stock heatsink.

I would like my next foray into watercooling to include my graphics card, but I'm unsure that adding the card in-line with the standard pump, etc will be possible? There seems to be a lot of discussion around about the narrow tubes and low flow pump that Thermaltake use? I've also read that a better approach is to split the pipes between the CPU and GPU but that requires even more pump capacity?

kevlong

Hellfire · Rated XXX Joined: 05 Aug 2003 Posts: 3473

I will concede that putting the screws in are a bit of a pain. That's due to there being no support for the individual 5.25 drives, so you have to hold them up, at the same time as holding them at the proper place for the holes to line up. So I think I know what you mean. Didn't encounter that issue the first time I built a system in this case, but recently I decided to swap my cases around, and did encounter this.

I'll recheck the area around the PSU, dont' remember anything and didn't notice anything when I installed a new psu for testing. But never know, could have missed it Smile

Like you, I really like the case once it's put together. I swapped my full tower cases just because I want this case to be in use for a long time, which can't be my main system, but I change it testing various cases over time. So for now, my main system is back in the Thermaltake Shark Smile

Not sure about the watercooling, I've only looked at one water cooling unit. Not really a big fan on water cooling as the results of the one unit I tried didn't get spectactular results. I would think that narrower tubes would mean less water flow, and less of a cooling capacity. Could be wrong of course, never know.

kevlong · Rated PG Joined: 04 Nov 2005 Posts: 7

I'll take the question on water cooling to one of the other boards and see what happens.

Thanks for the orginal article and for the recent exchanges.

Perhaps we should compare notes again after a few months and see if there is an extended test article opportunity?

Kevlong