Thermaltake Tenor HTPC

Another thing worth mentioning is the bottom of the case. Thermaltake has built in four very nice feet for this case. The rubber contacts provide good grip for any surface and the sides of the feet are gold colored. All in all they look very nice together with the overall design of the case. Aesthetically, this case will have no problem fitting in with your home theater system.

That’s a general overview of the case from the outside. Now let’s tear this thing apart and take a look inside.

Inside, this case looks pretty normal. Probably like any other “desktop” style case would. However you might notice the two large bars running across the top. Yep those are some heavy-duty support bars. Thermaltake most likely planned ahead for those who are looking to stack things on their HTPCs (audio receivers, pre-amplifiers, amplifiers, etc). After putting a good amount of weight on the case, nothing budged at all, so we’re pretty sure it’ll hold up if you ever want to stack things on top of it. The left support bar also acts as a hanging hard drive rack with enough room for two. This is probably the best place to put a hard drive in this case because the fan is right under it. Not all the other spots are cooled, and so the hard drives will bake. Something else worth mentioning I suppose is that it takes full ATX motherboards. This is something that is very handy for those who don’t want to buy microATX motherboards just for HTPC’s.

Installation:

After taking a good look at the case, we began installing our components in the case. In any case, we resorted to putting one of our Athlon XP systems into the Thermaltake Tenor. Since the system is supposed to be silent, we also replaced the 90mm ultra high speed Panaflo fan on the SI-97 with a low speed 80mm Panaflo. We then downclocked the CPU to 2.0GHz and under-volted it to 1.3V so heat output would be minimized. Installation went pretty smooth for this case and there were almost no problems. There was however one problem with the alignment of the expansion slots and the motherboard. The expansion slots were tilted away from the motherboard, which prevented us from securing the card with a screw. Other than that however everything else was fine.