Inside the Case

Many of you may be familiar with the future BTX standard that Intel is pushing, that is still some time off. Basically, BTX is an effort to extract heat more effectively out of our cases, along with some other trivial modifications. Some argue that BTX is more of an effort to extract $$$ out of our wallets, but I digress. Where BTX may offer the consumer an advantage over ATX is in cooler operating temperatures due to design and airflow of enclosures. Heat has become a major obstacle in pushing performance in PCs lately, and Intel hopes that BTX can offer better cooling performance over ATX.

The Silverstone TJ06 is definitely not your average case in any respect. What impressed me about this unit, when reading the product pages was the somewhat revolutionary layout of the case. Silverstone has chosen to incorporate a BTX like layout which in effect places the processor in the coolest part of the case. Not satisfied with this somewhat radical layout deviation, the designers at Silverstone implemented a "wind tunnel" to control airflow in the zone of the CPU



The astute observer will notice the right side of the case is open versus the standard left side opening on ATX format. Furthermore, the motherboard is flipped "upside down" so that the CPU is toward the bottom of the case, the aforementioned wind tunnel providing the signature flow characteristics for this case.

Case Specifications as per Silverstone:



The innards further explored

Looking closer at the wind tunnel design it's apparent a lot of thought went into the design and implementation of this unit. Clips lock the clear plastic tunnel in place, and allow for easy removal during setup and system changes. The tolerances were excellent, and both sides fit well without any excess force needed or sloppy fit noted. The tunnel fits up very close to the bottom of the case, with the other edge of the tunnel coming as close to the motherboard chipset heatsink as I would consider possible given production variances among manufacturers. There is an adjustment slide on the upper portion of the tunnel allowing for certain cables or possibly other interfering parts to clear.



With the case in hand I quickly went to work setting up my system in an effort to discern the finer qualities of this case. To test the premise of the case and the pseudo BTX layout, I chose to tax the cooling capabilities with an overclocked Prescott Pentium4 setup. The setup I used I had recently worked with for my Crucial Ballistix review with the exception of the power supply for which I substituted a 700W Zippy Power Supply.

JNav89GT's Test Setup
CPU	Intel P4 530 Retail-3.0GHz LGA 775
Mainboard	MSI 915G Combo
Memory	Crucial Ballistix DDR2 PC2-5300 1GB Dual Channel Kit(2x512mb)-Timings of Cas4 4:4:10 used through all testing
Video	ATI Radeon X700Pro
Power Supply	Zippy 700W (PSL-6701P)
Operating System	Windows XP SP2