Bays and Airflow

Here you can see that the Tsunami offers four 5.25" bays for optical drives, fan controllers, etc and two 3.5" bays for floppy drives or whatever else may fit in there. This should be more than enough for the average user. The power and reset buttons, along with the power and HDD activity LEDs are where they would be expected. The power and HDD LEDs are blue and fit nicely with the décor of the case. Just below these is a small section which juts out, this is for the key operated lock for the door. Then further down are more air-slits to keep the 120mm fan on the other side fully supplied.

The key-lock, as with most Thermaltake cases, has three positions. The first position locks the door and the inner panel, the second unlocks the door but keeps the inner panel locked and the third unlocks both the door and the inner panel. The picture shown above has the key-lock in the second position; the two pictures below have the key-lock in the third position.

The inner panel is to allow the use of the screw-less drive install system. The drives can be pushed in on the supplied rails and then the inner panel is closed and locked so that the drives are in perfect alignment with the front of the inner panel. This also allows you to access the filter for the 120mm fan… get rid of that dust build up, nice and easy! Removing, cleaning and reattaching the dust filter is a very simple and easy process and not at all time consuming.

Moving round to the side panel, you're immediately struck by the shape of the window; it's far from the bog standard square, rectangle and elliptical windows you can get, it follows a similar design to one or two of Thermaltake's prior side windows - the big X. Thermaltake's company logo is strikingly noticeable, emblazoned into the Perspex along with their slogan "Cool all your life." And then there's the 9cm fan just offset to the left of centre with its own simple, yet effective, black fan grill. One thing to note about this side fan though - there is no fan filter and the grill does not do a particularly great job of stopping dust - this just seems a little lacking after the filter on the fan at the front. The side panel utilises a very good method of affixing it to the case, the clips push towards the front of the case and the side panel swings out like a door. As with the front door, it also has a locking function to keep your parts safe at LAN parties when you are away from your computer.

The rear of the case is very standard for any case. You have a 120mm fan with 3 blue LEDs included with the case - this fan produces a remarkable amount of light in the case. I have the case set up with extra lights, the fan is as bright as the fan in my PSU but not quite as bright as my blue cathode and yet it still helps with lighting up the case.