by Nikita Nikolaichev , Anna Filatova
04/08/2005 | 04:06 PM
Thermaltake Company manufactures a lot of different computer components for hardware enthusiasts: starting with processor coolers and water cooling solutions, and finishing with cases and power supply units.
Thermaltake products may not be as radical as some solutions from Zalman, for instance, but they are still very interesting as they always are more than just system components.
Today we are going to take a closer look at Thermaltake Tsunami Dream system case, model VA3400BWA.
The case is shipped in a shiny box with a plastic carry-handle. The photo on the box gives you an idea of what you are going to find inside: strict stylish shape, black “metallic” color, wave-shaped front panel with the silver “water-line”.
The package also includes a power cable, a set of stands for the mainboard, a set of various screws for system assembly, two sets of keys, sliding rails for drives installing into the 5-inch bays, assembly guide and even a special cloth for proper case surface dusting.
By the way, the top and the side panels of the case should be treated very carefully. Any touch leave very noticeable or not very noticeable marks on them depending on how clean your hands are :) And if you are wiping off any stains or marks from these shiny surfaces make sure that you do not scratch them, as it actually doesn’t take long.
The left side panel of this Thermaltake Tsunami Dream model features a transparent window. You can see everything inside the system case through this window. And right in the middle of it there is a metal grid and an 80-mm fan right behind it, sucking the air in.
Behind the black aluminum door covering the plastic front panel there are Power On and Reset buttons alongside with system status and HDD activity LEDs. The bays for 3.5- and 5-inch devices are all hidden behind the blank plastic covers clipped in (no screws used).
It is actually not always convenient, I should say: in order to remove the very top cover and install an optical drive, I had to remove the top hinge of the front panel first, as it was in the way.
The metal blank covers are also fastened with screws, which is very reliable and practical:
To the right of the front panel there is a lock with three basic positions:
In the latter case, once you open the plastic panel behind the front door, you will see a special grid separating the fan from the front panel. This grid is fastened with clips, so you can easily remove it for cleaning if necessary.
The second lock serves to prevent unauthorized access inside the system. It is situated on the side panel. You will not be able to remove the side panel if it is locked.
A standard set of connectors, such as two USB ports, one IEEE1394 port and two connectors for headphones and a microphone, are located not on the front panel but on the top of the case behind a small push-to-open cover: if you are planning to put your system case under the desk, it might be pretty hard to reach for these connectors, but other than that this location seems to be pretty convenient: you don’t have to open the front panel door every time you need to plug in the headphones or a flash drive.
At the bottom of the case there are special stands, which can be rotated in order to ensure maximum stability of the case on any surface:
Now let’s take a closer look at what can be found inside.
A quality 400W power supply unit will undoubtedly suit for a good gaming system:
The PSU is equipped with two 80-mm fans. One of these fans sucks the air in, and another one blows the air outside the case. The PSU features more than enough connectors for different devices: 9 connectors for optical drives, HDDs or feeding additional power onto NVIDIA GeForce 6800 or ATI RADEON X800 based graphics cards, 2 connectors for 3.5-inch floppy drives or ATI RADEON 9700/9500 based type of graphics cards, one SATA drive power connector and, finally, 20-pin and 4-pin mainboard connectors.
The case is equipped with a removable basket with five spots for hard drives and right opposite to it there is a 120-mm fan sucking the air in from the direction of the front panel.
The mounting holes for screws holding the HDDs inside this basket are covered with elastic rubber bushings, which reduce the noise level generated by HDDs. As is known, the elastic mounting can negatively tell on the performance as well as reliability of the hard disk drives. However, there is no need to worry in our case, as firstly, these bushings are relatively small, and secondly, you can almost completely eliminate their elastic effect if you fix the HDD holding screws really tightly.
Let’s move on. There is a removable basket for two 3-inch drives above the hard disk drives. Above that there are four sections for 5-inch devices.
The proper airflow in and outside the case is provided by four fans. One 80-mm fan on the side of the case and a 120-mm fan on the front panel suck cold external air inside the case, while the PSU fan and another 120-mm fan on the back panel blow the warm air outside the case. By the way, the fan on the back panel is made of transparent plastic and is lit by blue LEDs:
If you wish you may monitor the rotation speeds of the 120-mm fans: besides the power supply cable, both of them have a special wire to be connected to the mainboard.
The only thing you should take care in advance concerns with the mainboard back panel. The panel shipped with the case is very unlikely to go well with all the mainboards, so the best thing you can do is to make sure that the panel shipped with the mainboard is right at hand.
The system assembly doesn’t cause any problems and can be performed very easily. The mainboard with the CPU and memory sits on the special stands included with the case, the drives fit smoothly into the bays and baskets, USB and sound connectors on the top panel of the case find their pins on the mainboard, and power supply cables reach easily to all internal devices. The graphics card can be installed in three simple moves, as the case is equipped with screw-free fastening locks for the expansion cards on the back panel.
Well, let’s turn it on right now…
The sight is definitely beautiful: the front panel is lit up with two LEDs, and the shining 120-mm fan on the case back panel sees through the transparent side window:
With the lights turned off the whole thing looks even more impressive:
Well, the lighting does look beautiful, but I wonder why they didn’t go away from the super-bright blue diodes and use something like green or soft golden lights? I am sure the case would look not any worse, but the eyes would feel much better without this “acid” blue light, especially if the case stands on the desk or faces the user.
Of course, everything concerning the lighting and LEDs is our purely subjective opinion. Another subjective estimate is connected with the noise level of this solution. When the system is powered up the room fills with pretty loud noise. By disconnecting the fans one by one we managed to figure out that one of the PSU fans is the noisiest of all. The noise generated by this particular fan is louder than the noise generated by all other fans of the system case altogether. I assume that this shouldn’t be the case, and maybe the sample we got for review had ill-balanced PSU fan. If this supposition is incorrect, then I believe you will have to replace the PSU fans or the entire PSU unit to reduce the noisiness of your system.
Other system fans work much quieter, but if you still feel uncomfortable with the remaining noise, you can try feeding lower power to the fans with the help of the power supply regulators from the same Thermaltake Company. In this case the ability to monitor the fan rotation speeds will definitely come in handy.
During our test session all fans of the tested PC case were turned on, the voltage regulators weren’t used. We ran all benchmarks with the case closed. The system assembled inside the Thermaltake Tsunami Dream case included the following components:
We ran the tests in a few modes. Here they are:
Before we measured the temperature, we kept the system running in each mode for 30 minutes.
For monitoring pf the processor temperature (CPU) and mainboard surface temperature (MBoard) we used the latest version of Motherboard Monitor utility reading the temperatures from the built-in CPU thermal diode and mainboard thermal diode.
For monitoring of the graphics chip temperature (GPU) and the graphics card surface temperature (VBoard) we used RivaTuner utility.
The temperature of the heat-spreaders on the RAM memory modules (Mem) and graphics memory chips temperature (VMem) was measured with the help of Fluke-54 II thermometer.
The HDD temperature was also measured with the Fluke thermometer, because the built-in thermal diode of the hard disk drive was reporting absolutely wrong temperatures. According to DTemp utility (HDD Int), the HDD temperature could reach 15-120oC for the room temperature of 25oC.
The external thermometer diodes were fastened to the “warmest” spots of the HDD: on top of the lid right next to the spindle (HDD 1) and onto the micro-processor chip on the drive PCB (HDD 2).
The room temperature (Room) during this test session was 25-27oC.
In Idle mode all system components remain almost absolutely cold. The highest temperature can be observed by RADEON X800 Pro graphics processor, but even its 40.8oC are still far below the limit.
Please, pay special attention to the HDD temperatures: external thermal diodes provide pretty adequate results, while the built-in diode seems to have completely lost its mind: the HDD temperature it reports is even below the current room temperature :)
Now let’s start HDD defragmentation:
The system components warmed a couple of degrees more, which is quite logical in this mode.
Hard disk drive defragmentation loads the HDD in the first place, but it also involves the system CPU and the RAM, of course. All this results into a slight increase in the internal case temperature, which pushed the graphics processor temperature about 1oC higher, and this baby is definitely not participating in the HDD defragmentation process :)
The hard drive temperature got only 2-3oC higher, according to the external diodes, and this is an excellent result. As we have already said above, the case is equipped with a 120mm fan blowing cool air onto the HDD basket that is why Thermaltake Tsunami Dream is very unlikely to have any problems with the HDD cooling.
Now let’s check out the CPU Burn mode when we start two copies of SuperPi test at a time:
Hot air inside Thermaltake Tsunami Dream case doesn’t stay there for long: air flow directed from outside pushes the hot air out that is why you really do not need any super-high-performance expensive CPU coolers. 52oC is quite an acceptable result for a CPU running with a standard box cooler.
Now let’s start 3DMark05 and make the graphics card work:
The graphics card is equipped with a relatively weak cooler for a GPU of this type, and the graphics memory chips have no cooling at all. However, excellent airflow organized inside the considered case provides great results for this test of ours. The graphics core and graphics memory temperatures reached only 65.9oC and 48.6oC respectively.
The interesting thing is that the CPU temperature in this test turned out just a little lower than in the previous test when we were running SuperPi benchmark. The calculations in the 3DMark05 as well as the workload imposed by the graphics card driver seem to be just a little lower than the CPU workload created by the SuperPi test.
Now let’s switch from the tests to the actual gameplay.
FarCry doesn’t give a break to the CPU, which you can tell from the temperature measurements above: it is close to that in the CPU Burn mode, rather than to Idle mode.
The graphics card components heat up considerably less in the Game mode than in the VGA Burn, so we shouldn’t worry about the graphics card overheating.
The curious thing is that this gaming test turned out the hardest for the system RAM: the thermal diode on the RAM heat-spreader indicated the highest temperature. However, 42.9oC is still too far from the emergency threshold, so there is no cause for concern, really.
All other system temperatures grew up a little bit compared with what we saw in the idle mode.
Well, Thermaltake Tsunami Dream system case is certainly more than just a computer case. Stylish exterior, shiny surfaces, aluminum front panel with decorative lighting and transparent side window showing a glowing 120-mm fan will definitely appeal to those users who pay special attention to the way their system looks. Those who use headphones or external USB/IEEE1394 devices a lot will probably like the location of the corresponding ports on the case top. Excellent internal airflow and ventilation provided by two 120-mm fans and two 80-mm fans allows building high-performance systems inside this case with no need to worry about the thermal parameters of the separate components such as CPUs, HDDs, etc.
Now let’s sum up the highs and lows in our traditional list:
Highs:
Lows: