HEXUS.reviews :: Thermaltake Armor LCS (Liquid Cooling System)

[chuckskull]

Damn

[gamertech]

try VIP Computer Centre Ltd or creative computing
they both sell Thermaltake in the UK so they should have it, the addresses are on the thermaltake site as dealers.

[chuckskull]

try VIP Computer Centre Ltd or creative computing
they both sell Thermaltake in the UK so they should have it, the addresses are on the thermaltake site as dealers.

Yeah I tired both a while back, they don't sell just the panel by itself.

I like the case, but it's not good enough to warrant buying a whole case just for one fan.

[chuckskull]

Just in case anyone comes looking http://specialtech.co.uk/spshop/cust...5&cat=0&page=1

In stock, got mine this morning. Knocked a good 10c off my already good temps. Spins much slower than I expected, but it's obviously moving the air. Northbridge has dropped from 51c to 39.

[Spanamana]

I purchased a Thermaltake Armour LCS before reading this review. What a different experience I had to the reviewer. Let me explain.

The assembly of the processor cooler went very smoothly and worked very well as per the review. However, the rest of the case was a great disappointment.

The motherboard I am using is the Asus Striker Extreme and has a seperate riser for the sound connectors. When fitted, the spring loaded "no screws" clips were a complete disappointment as they wuold not secure the card in place, it just rattled around. This was also true of the Nvidia 8800 grpahics card I fitted. In the end I had to remove the clip system altogether and resort to conventional screws.

The hard drives I used were 6 x 500Gb units - the plan was to mount them on the assembly that also contained the radiator. It was only after I had mounted them and tried to place the pump and reservoir that I found this was impossible. The only way to make it work with the six drives I had was to mount 3 beside the PSU and 3 in the radiator rack. After this the pump and reservoir could be placed (just) in the floor of the case. There is no way on God's earth that you could fit 10 drives in this puppy.

Additionally, i had real problems with the fitting of the radiator unit. It is extremely difficult to put in and take out; also the no screws system fails again as the rack rattles around like a bean in a can if you don't use screws to fix it in place. Which also begs the question: why bother to fit a no screws system to only one side of the case? Very poor indeed. I would say the no screws system made it more difficult to build this system, rather than easier.

Overall the cooling system has been very impressive. I had a motherboard fault within a week of building and I had to confess I had nightmares at the idea of stripping it all down to send it back for replacement. However, the head unit came away without difficulty and the adhesive H bracket came off at the back without too much difficulty, with help from a hair dryer to raise the temperature.

Re-assembly went very smoothly too and the system started working again without problems. The processor (P4, 2.4 quad core) runs at a very impressive 23 degrees centigrade when idle and even when running at 100% only gets as high as 35 degrees. I cannot see how the reviewer got such high temperatures. The motherboard was running at a maximum of 46 degrees (41 degrees at idle).

I also had a hard drive failure after two weeks which required removing the radiator system to take the drive out of the front assembly (why oh why is it never the easy ones at the back of the case?). This took a fair amount of manoevring as I couldn't remember how I'd done it before (Put it down to age).

In summary then I would give the water cooling system 9 out of 10, it is very well designed and there was plenty of pipework to use. The case I would give 4/10 as it was very pooly designed indeed. The good news is that this system is now running well and is whisper quiet in operation. The drives on the front are all mounted on rubber grommets which keeps it very quiet indeed (although you have to use the right screws). The connector tray on the top was a waste as well - why provide two USB sockets and not have them linked to one cable? Why have two seperate sockets (even the Striker Extreme only has two sockets on its motherboard and one of those is used for its own external facing plate.

The nature of using water cooling is that you have to find a way to find room for the pump and reservoir somwhere, but Thermaltake seem to have forgotten this. Maybe this case was adapted from an air cooled design, but there are serveral design changes that appear obvious and those fron wings are just a wast of time as they catch the drive drawer of the DVD writer unless you are extremely careful.