ThermalTake Armor A60 Case Review

1. Introduction2. The Thermaltake A60 Armor (External)3. The Thermaltake A60 Armor (Internal) & System Build4. Testing Methodology & Performance Results5. Acoustics Testing6. Closing Thoughts7. View All Pages

When we remove the side panel, we are greeted with a first class paint job throughout. There are no patchy areas, and nothing is badly finished. All surfaces are perfectly coated and we could feel no rough edges during our analysis.

The other side of the chassis – there is a hole cut for easy access to motherboard backplates and there are several areas for routing.

There are plenty of bay slots for hard drives – the system to hold these is rather flimsy however. To remove, the glasp is pushed inwards and they slide out. They are made of very thin plastic and I wouldn't be too sure that these would last a very long time with abuse.

The top drive system is easy to work with, and although we rarely include an optical drive in our system builds now, this proved to be well designed when we tested it out.

Inside at the rear, we can see the blue USB cable which runs under the motherboard and around the front. They supply a 120mm fan at the back of the chassis to help with the removal of hot air in the CPU area. There is also a 200mm fan at the top to further aid with a hot running system. If this isn't enough then you can add another fan in front of this.

The bottom of the chassis features vented areas which include dust filters.

For the purposes of our review today we really wanted to break the mould and decided to see if this chassis would handle an overclocked Intel Core i7 980X CPU with a HD5870 and 6GB of DDR3 1600 memory.

We moved our trusted Intel DX58SO motherboard, Core i7 980x CPU, Thermaltake Frio cooler and Kingston memory into the case without a hitch. We have active cooling on the northbridge to help with overclocking later.

We also added a Noctua 120mm Fan into the side panel, we will perform tests with the fan on and off later to see if it helps with cooling on such a high powered system. You can also see we removed the Kingston memory cooler and then played around with a the second fan on the Frio, this doesn't add noise to the system if both are kept on low speeds and its much better when overclocking.

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