A serious stand-up, show-off chassis for big boards
Years back, when a small website called out for product-review editors. I leapt at the opportunity: I’d just wrapped up a four-year stint as a systems supplier. That experience provided the credentials I’d need for the transition from industry supplier to industry observer. For one thing, I’d been the first source for an exposé on capacitor plague (“Got Juice”) at EDN.
Want to show off every high-end PC component you just bought, but in a small desk footprint? If you have the skill and desire, you can fit it all inside Thermaltake's The Tower 500 for maximum visibility.
Twice as wide and the same height as the average Extended ATX (EATX) full tower, The Tower 500’s dimensions focus more on component visibility than component count. There isn’t, for example, any space for a second power supply or other unusual redundancies, but the space it has is instead devoted to providing a full-frontal view of a single motherboard that’s up to 13 by 13 inches in size. PC cases that offer that level of component visibility usually run at a luxury price, but The Tower 500's $169.99 list price puts it on a level that's more in line with the average enthusiast chassis.
Around back, we find a large magnetic filter sheet covering an enormous rear panel vent, a full ATX power supply bay with dual mounting patterns to allow the power supply to be flipped if desired, and a slide-out dust filter for the power supply bay’s air inlet. Loosening two screws on the back panel allows it to be lifted off, while a gap above it allows the top panel to be pulled off. More than just a handhold, the top panel gap is also designed to allow cable egress.
Front-panel ports include four USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports, a single USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port, and a pair of classic stereo jacks for a headphone and microphone. The power button is nearly surrounded by a glowing (blue) power-on indicator ring, save for a small segment near the top that flashes red to indicate hard drive activity.
Held down by the top panel, the upper panels of the front and sides slide upward off mounting slots to provide internal access. The sides are interchangeable and may be rotated to position ventilation holes at either the front or rear portion of the motherboard chamber.
Lower front and side panels are secured under the edge via thumbscrews, and removing these exposes the three sides of the power supply chamber.
Removing the entire outer shell adds to the proportional perspective: The motherboard is mounted several inches below the top of the case, pointing back-end-up, placing it at the focal center of a finished build.
Each of the two removable panels that separate the motherboard from the power supply chambers can hold a single 3.5-inch drive, two 2.5-inch drives, a single 120mm fan, or the two ends of an included triple-fan radiator bracket. Two screws at the front, and two tabs at the back, connect each cover plate to the front radiator bracket and motherboard tray, respectively.
Options become a little less decisive as we consider the possibilities, as removing a cover plate provides users access to a multi-pattern water-pump mounting point. Pumps with integrated reservoirs will protrude through the right cover plate’s location, preventing it from being installed. Since these cover plates are the lower mounting point of the included triple-fan radiator bracket, removing the right cover prevents the installation of a radiator on the case’s right side.
Flipping the front-panel radiator bracket allows it to draw air from the bottom-panel vent rather than the front panel. It also prevents the reinstallation of power-chamber cover plates, since the top of the bracket was formerly the forward mounting point for those, and also partly obscures the water-pump mounting point, though enough of it remains exposed that it will still likely fit most pump brackets.
A removable drive tray behind the motherboard tray holds two 120mm exhaust fans, while a removable power supply bracket sits beneath. Full-size power supplies of just about any length will fit, since the case’s default configuration provides 13 inches of space between this mounting flange and the front radiator support.
Included on the drive tray are two 120mm/140mm mounts that can each be repurposed to hold a single 3.5-inch drive, two lower cages that each hold a 3.5-inch drive, and two removable upper cages that each hold up to two 2.5-inch drives. The upper cages can also be replaced with 3.5-inch drives, allowing a total of six 3.5-inch drives, or four 3.5-inch drives and four 2.5-inch drives, or two 3.5-inch drives plus four 2.5-inch drives and two fans, behind the motherboard.
The Tower 500 offers its builders a far more flexible configuration than most cases, but using our simplified component set will at least allow us to compare its performance to lesser-equipped case models. Two of our components were provided by their manufacturers specifically for these tests: Corsair's iCue H100i RGB PRO XT CPU cooler serves both the CPU and its voltage regulator via proximity to the latter, while the long cables and PS2 adapter plate of FSP’s SFX-based Dagger Pro 850W power supply (model SDA2-850) lets us use the same component across cases of various size. Here's a full accounting of all the parts and software we used...
The Tower 500 includes a radiator bracket set designed to hold three 120mm fans (or a so-called 360mm radiator), a beep-code speaker for motherboard headers, a bag of #6-32 (UNC) screws for 3.5-inch drives and various devices, a bag of M3 screws for 2.5-inch drives and motherboard standoffs, a set of four screws for installing a power supply, three extra standoffs to support the leading edge of 13-inch-deep full-spec EATX motherboards, a manual, a sheet of adhesive foam washers for damping vibrations around 2.5-inch drive mounts (if you're still using hard drives there as opposed to SSDs), a bag of foam grommets for damping vibrations of 3.5-inch drives, and a pack of cable ties.
Front-panel cables are factory bundled into two sections to clear the motherboard hole...
The cable group on the Tower 500’s right side includes a USB 3 Gen 1 that feeds two Type-A ports, and an HD Audio cable that connects the headphone and microphone jacks.
With the cables connected, we can finally assess how our ATX components appear within the Tower 500’s confines: We see enough space beneath our motherboard’s forward edge that we could have installed a 12.8-inch motherboard, but installing a 13-inch-deep motherboard would have required us to give up the power supply's bay covers. Meanwhile, there’s enough space to the left of the board that a vintage XL-ATX motherboard would fit, but putting one there would complicate cable management.
Now, note that our test build would better reflect The Tower 500's use case if the parts were RGB lit. Designed to showcase components, The Tower 500 would have accomplished that task much better had we simply used components with more LEDs. But the test gear is the test gear!
From a design and implementation perspective, we’d expect The Tower 500 to perform somewhat closely to the O11 Dynamic EVO from Lian Li. While only around two degrees separates these two, the Fractal Design Pop XL Silent wedges itself between them in CPU temperature. The Tower 500 maintains an acceptable temperature even as it suffers a slight loss here.
The Tower 500 falls further behind in voltage regulator temperature, and that’s probably because our AIO CPU cooler’s fans are a relatively great distance from it. Having noted this, even its losing temperature would be safe in environments far hotter than ours.
As for video card cooling, what the Tower 500 most likely needs is a couple of intake fans at the bottom simply to become competitive, but at least our GPU never got hot.
Our SPL meter showed that the Tower 500 was the second noisiest case in today’s comparison group, though the 1.6db delta between it and the Pop XL Silent will be barely noticeable to most people.
In fact, while as-delivered performance wasn’t exciting, it was ordinary enough that we’d probably just add a couple of quiet fans to the intake to bump up the balance of any subsequent build.
All the performance talk begs the question, though: Would you even use The Tower 500 for any kind of regular PC build? Showing off is the Tower 500’s raison d'être, and we aren’t building a show system in the immediate future with parts like we use in our test build; they'd be RGB-packed and chosen for looks as much as fine thermal performance.
Show-system builders would be likely to do far more than add a couple of intake fans, and are more likely to see Thermaltake’s example build here as a minimum effort(Opens in a new window) for what this case is designed to do. We’re thinking custom liquid-cooling loops, custom-bent hardline tubing, and pumps with gigantic top reservoirs as representatives of the true nature of its market. Still, even if all you want to do is max out on pre-lit RGB bits, like at the link, The Tower 500 delivers a fine ready-to-go palette for your painterly PC efforts.
Want to show off every high-end PC component you just bought, but in a small desk footprint? If you have the skill and desire, you can fit it all inside Thermaltake's The Tower 500 for maximum visibility.
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Years back, when a small website called out for product-review editors. I leapt at the opportunity: I’d just wrapped up a four-year stint as a systems supplier. That experience provided the credentials I’d need for the transition from industry supplier to industry observer. For one thing, I’d been the first source for an exposé on capacitor plague (“Got Juice”) at EDN.
By that time, I’d already self-published some guidelines on hardcore PC stuff: pin-modifying processors to defeat compatibility checks and overclock non-overclockable systems. I saw a chance to get paid for my knowledge, and have since written more than a thousand pieces (many of them for the seminal tech site Tom's Hardware) before finding my latest opportunity: with PCMag.
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