Thermaltake Armor A30 Case Review: Opening the Puzzle Box
by Dustin Sklavos on September 24, 2012 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
- Thermaltake
- MicroATX
Noise and Thermal Testing, IGP
Ordinarily I have a pretty clear idea of what I expect from an enclosure, but with the Thermaltake Armor A30 I honestly had no idea how I expected it to perform. The trio of small fans (two 60mm and one 90mm) without any kind of fan control led me to believe this case would actually be incredibly loud, but I wasn't sure if airflow was going to work out since the arrangement of fans felt strangely haphazard. As it turns out, for all of their foibles in assembly, Thermaltake definitely got the cooling right.
The A30 was tested with an ambient temperature of about 24C.
The A30's thermals are basically competitive with the best of the other cases at our relatively unstressful stock settings. The CPU temperatures are actually pretty impressive; I was expecting the heatsink's fan to be competing with the intake fan on the PSU for air, but that turned out not to be the case.
Fan speed on the CPU's heatsink was also very competitive, with only BitFenix's Prodigy besting it and not by a particularly significant amount.
Honestly this is what impressed me about the A30. Despite having three tiny fans, the A30 is able to run with impressively low noise levels. The A30 is a hair over the noise floor of the sound meter under load, and certainly tolerable.
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Ryomitomo - Monday, September 24, 2012 - link
I have recently built an i7-3770K + GTX680 system with the A30 case for my brother-in-law. The case is not easy to build with. Tidying the wires is very hard. The top fan is placed in a weird location, the PSU blocks over half of the fan. The GTX680 power plug jabs against the metal casing for the 5.25" bays, I had to bend the power wires 90 degrees at the plug to fit them under the metal casing.However, after the system was put together carefully, I have to say it is rather quiet unit and the temperature of the CPU and GTX680 is only a few degrees higher than my Thermaltake Armor Revo case build with same CPU and GTX680.
piroroadkill - Monday, September 24, 2012 - link
I think there's a reason why the Prodigy has become popular - it looks good as well as being a mini-ITX case you could actually use for a high end machine.Meaker10 - Monday, September 24, 2012 - link
All those thumb screws, the drive cage and removable tray are based on the lanparty lite series they did. This is the same but with more fans which is why the basic design feels dated. You get used to it though and you can take it apart fairly quickly.BuffaloChuck - Monday, September 24, 2012 - link
Cube cases still are doing this upside down. They need to put the motherboard on top, and power-supply/other drives on the bottom. The MB has 95% of all connections, requirement finger-tip time, and hosts most of the changes. And, if they'd put the HDDs in a two-stack nose-to-nose config under the MB tray, sticking the connections to the outside, they'd have plenty of room for airflow between drives AND space to add more. Cubes always do this design upside down.BuffaloChuck - Monday, September 24, 2012 - link
And why can't the reviewers utilitize the space offered? Instead of proving MiniATX boards fit in MicroATX cases, why not fill 'em up and THEN do the tests? The case engineers, after all, put those drive-cages in there for a reason. USE 'EM and do REAL reviews.cjb110 - Monday, September 24, 2012 - link
Because then the stats of the 3 bay case wouldn't be comparable with the 2 bay case.I think AnandTech does a good job of mentioning if they feel utilizing the extra features would be significant positive/negative.
From this review its fairly obvious it would cope with the bay's being filled in terms of performance, but it would make the already difficult install even harder.
7amood - Monday, September 24, 2012 - link
review http://www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=317 pleeeeeeeeeease.Grok42 - Tuesday, September 25, 2012 - link
I 2nd the motion. Also, the LIAN LI PC-Q25 and PC-Q16.xcomvic - Monday, September 24, 2012 - link
Is that most don't have a handle on the top of it to easily lug it around...It wouldn't have taken an engineer to figure out how to attach one easily to the top of the thing...or the side..or back....wherever. I know there's been some good cases out there WITH handles, those are real LAN cases.Orvtrebor - Monday, September 24, 2012 - link
They should have added a handle again like from their earlier cube designs.Without it whats the point of doing this case? A Silverstone TJ08-E or PS07 will better serve a microatx build, and if your going to run itx there is a wide range of superior/smaller cases.