Thermaltake Xaser III V2000A

Cases & PSU/Cases by A-star @ 2003-06-11

A testdrive around the installation course with the Thermaltake Xaser III. Is it the best case out there or does it have some flaws? Find out in this review!

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Installing Xaser III

Installing the beast:

I will install the following components in the case. ECS K7S6A Motherboard Soundblaster
Live 4.1 Ati Radeon 9000 cooled with Zalman Passive cooler 3com network card Plextor 10/10/32 writer Samsung and Maxtor hard disk Rounded IDE cables.

Madshrimps (c)


Installing the motherboard was not hard at all. There is enough space inside for mounting it. I had some problems when I wanted to install the I/O back panel but that went ok. To my deepest regret the Xaser had no removable motherboard tray which I find a great lacking of this fantastic case.


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For securing your PCI and Graphic card, Thermaltake offers a simple but effective method. You tilt / slide the lever up, install the card and slide the card back. I would be simple if My sound card (Soundblaster Live Value) was a little too big and wouldn't fit as you can see on the second picture.


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Installing a hard drive is very easy with this case, you secure the rails to your disk (no tools needed) and slide them into the hard disk cage.


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Same for the cd-writer. Use the supplied rails to fasten them.


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Here I encountered the first problem: when I tried to attach my rounded IDE cable, I had to stretch it real hard. I was a little bit too short (I used standard rounded cables). Also there was a bend in the cable when I connected the 2 drives so that I couldn't close the side-panel.


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Here you have a better view of the bend in the cable. This is because Thermaltake installed the hard-drive cage so that the back (where the cables connect) faces the side-panel.


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This is the case with everything installed (I didn’t clean up the cables due to time constraints). As you can see there is still place left for water-cooling or other modifications.


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Here we have everything up and running. Notice how the blue bracket blocks the complete view on the motherboard.


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If you look at the front of the case you can see the Thermaltake logo glowing. At the back of the logo there is a LED or something else that illuminates the whole logo. It isn't very clear on the picture, but it looks very cool

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