Thermaltake Armor A30 MATX Case Review

👤by James Clewer Comments 📅08-04-11
Installation continued


Thermaltake advertise the A30 as being able to cope with a 350mm graphics card meaning virtually any high performance card should be useable in the case. The GTX260 is a 270mm card as you can see.


GTX260.


I installed the card into the PCIe x16 slot (the No 2 slot) and slid the tray into the case. It stopped with around a centimeter remaining... the card had come into contact with the vertical 3.5" drive bay in the forward upper cage as you can see below.


Cage contact.


Here you can see the protruding tray at the rear of the case - to close the GTX260 would need to be installed into the first socket which in the case of the Gigabyte MA785GMT-UD2H board here is impossible since it only has a x1 slot in that position.


Case not shut.


Thermaltake specifically state that 350mm cards can be installed in both the 1st and 2nd slots however I believe they should add a note explaining that a card installed into the 2nd slot needs to be a single slot design to successfully clear the front cage. Indeed, use of a triple slot card like the recently reviewed ASUS HD6950 2GB DirectCU II would simply be a non starter.

Unfortunately as a result of this I had to forgo the install of the GTX260 and rely on the MA785GMT's onboard video capability for testing.

I screwed the PSU into place within the cage and lowered it into the A30. Thermaltake state that the clearance between the CPU and PSU should allow a heatsink height of up to 90mm.


Installed into the cage.


Here you can see the clearance between the PSU and the Scythe Shuriken cooler.


PSU/CPU clearance.


Top on and ready to go. There's a little space around the DVD drive but that allows the cases front cover to be removed without needing to extract the drive.


Installed.


Powered up and functioning - the supplied fans are pretty good although the 60mm fans may need to be undervolted a little.


Looks great powered up.




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