Thermaltake's Xaser III Skull Series - A Case For the Tough Guy
by Purav Sanghani on March 11, 2004 4:20 PM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
Installation
The Thermaltake Xaser III VM3000A's main feature is its completely screw-less design. Though it can be difficult to deal with some screw-less features, such as drive mounting rails, Thermaltake has done a great job with the design and construction of its chassis.A combination of both plastic and metal snap-ins, clips, and brackets are used in the VM3000A to hold all hardware in place. Metal brackets have been provided with the package to add a new drive easily into one of its 7 usable bays. The brackets themselves are made of steel and are somewhat flexible to allow a drive to be locked in place. A downside to these brackets is that they can be easily bent out of shape if not properly handled.
Click to enlarge.
The total time for installation was about 15 minutes for all of the necessary components. A small roadblock that we ran into was the lack of sufficient drive mounting rails. The package includes 5 pairs of rails, which seems incomplete in order to fill all 6 drive bays. The VM3000A, however, does have the traditional holes to mount various drives with screws. Again, the most time consuming portion of the installation was connecting all of the wires from the Hardcano module to the motherboard as well as all of the case fans to the power supply. The USB plugs that go to the motherboard are a bit frustrating to install. All wires are separated by their own plugs, where a better design would have been to group the wires together to end with a single easy install connector.
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JKing76 - Friday, March 12, 2004 - link
Cheese. 100% cheese.Orchid1 - Friday, March 12, 2004 - link
Looks terrible, pc case design has come a long way since the beige box, but in this case I'd rather have a beige box any day.Skulls? is his being marketed at 15 year old Goth Rock fans?
nastyemu25 - Friday, March 12, 2004 - link
guess i wasn't the only one who thought this thing was incredibly uglyaraczynski - Friday, March 12, 2004 - link
that has got to be the single most butch ugly implementation of a side window in a case i've ever seen, obviously a last second throw in with no thought or planning. disgusting.CtK - Friday, March 12, 2004 - link
why dont you show pics with the case fully installed with parts??BenSkywalker - Friday, March 12, 2004 - link
Reading through everything in the review it seems like this is a lower end case then the original XIII line, was that your impression Purav?Less fans, less space and sharp edges- sounds like a step back for TT here.
diehlr - Friday, March 12, 2004 - link
This case is the most hideous thing I have seen in a long time. What is the deal with PC case designs? Nearly every one of them is tacky and looks flat out cheap.clarkmo - Thursday, March 11, 2004 - link
This is the same as the Enermax Titanium case. I don't know who the oem is. Mobo attaches with studs vey easily. Hopefully a new trend.Just pop it right in. It's only noisy if you have noisy fans. I have a 120 mm in the lower area. The psu is very tight buy my slk900a on my 8rda manages to fit. http://www.case-mod.com/store/product_info.php?pro...Adul - Thursday, March 11, 2004 - link
congrats Purv :)mostlyprudent - Thursday, March 11, 2004 - link
You mention the inconvenience of having to remove add in cards to remove the motherboard tray, but why bother completely removing the tray unless I'm replacing the motherboard - hence removing the cards anyway? Of course, I've never had a removable tray that was easy enough to remove to justify taking it out for memory or even CPU changes.