PC cases are all the same. Boring black boxes, IO out the back?
No, that's where the Thermaltake Tower 300 comes in.
There's eight different colors, they've cut the corners off, and all the IO actually comes out the top.
But I don't wanna build in the blue one, this looks like a Fortnite chug jug.
I wanna build in the pink one, pink's more my color.
See, I was really interested in the Tower 300, mainly because I've actually owned the Tower 900 twice,
the Tower 100, and I've built in the Tower 500 before.
But this one, I was really attracted to all the colors they come in.
Oh, look at that. Oh, it's got a little bit of blue, it's got a blue inside.
Oh, that looks so awesome. It looks like cotton candy machine.
Yeah. Looks like that bell-doping keyboard. So you still got the three glass panels
that the Tower series is kind of known for, but they've again decided to angle it this way,
giving you kind of more of a rounded glass effect to it instead of having big pillars in the way.
And everything is mounted with all of the IO at the top.
So your GPU is gonna be vertical, and this is an MATX case,
even though it's quite large for a micro case.
Still very excited to get in here. I think you just,
oh, it's taped. I've actually been a fan of rounded glass style cases
for a while now. Fan tech started rounding their glasses, doing a take on the classic Lee and Lee O11 case.
There we go. And I think this one does it very subtle, and I actually kind of enjoy this rounded look.
Wow, there's a lot of room in here for a micro-ITX case.
Let's get all of our mounts out here.
Beautiful. So these are all the plates and the screws to hold everything on as well as in here.
There's this little plate, which can actually replace the front plate,
and you can put a screen there. Why?
Because you want to. It also apparently comes with a stand,
which I'm told we have, that can mount your computer at a weird angle like this,
taking up 90% of your desk. That's fine though.
What's up? Can you cut that at her?
For front IO, you've got your power button, your reset button, your mic, headphone jack,
two USB three ports, and a USB type C.
Enough IO, I would like four USB ports, but that's kind of just a nitpicky thing for me.
Underneath this, it actually comes with thermal takes two 140 millimeter fans.
The airflow design of this case is it takes everything in from the bottom and the sides,
and the idea is hot air rises, so they want to shoot it all out the top.
It's got these thumbscrews on the top that they claim are tool-less, but I'll use a tool.
Just to get it started. Nope, okay.
We're going all the way. There we go. There's that one on the other side here.
Oh, seems like they're captive. That's great. And this whole thing just tilts up.
And this is where you're going to be able to access, you know, plugging in a USB drive
or plugging in your cables, bit inconvenient, but it gives a really clean look
when all the cables just come out the back like this. And this whole case is very easy to build in
because every single side can just all come apart like this
until you're all the way in. And oh my goodness, you have like 720 degrees worth
of working room to really be able to get in there and plug in your cables.
Wait, what? 720 degrees?
Yeah, because you don't have 360. Yes, you would go less.
Which is 720. 720 is two full circles.
Oh, I meant 270.
Can you cut that out of it? And like I mentioned, all the air is meant to come in the bottom here,
so every little one of these sides has a tiny little dust filter on all of them.
Here, here, here, some at the bottom, which you can flip that and get at.
Oh, perfect. I'm gonna take this out once a year, two years.
Give it a little bit of a wave. Slot it back in, perfect.
And the back one is even magnetic as well. Makes it nice and easy to clean.
These bottom ones a little bit harder to reach at, but.
That's okay. Let's tuck it back in there.
What the heck? It was bad design. Totally wasn't user error.
You have to slide in one side first, then it magnets down. I was doing it the opposite way.
It was user error. Oh, wow, never mind. The whole back panel comes off too.
Dang, it's just a shell of itself now. It weighs like nothing.
All your cables for your front IO. One rubber grommet for all the cable management.
Your fans came down the side here. Power supply mounts at the bottom of this case,
and then everything can tuck up behind the motherboard, just like a traditional PC.
There's room for two drives back here, either 2.5 or 3.5.
But if that's not enough storage for you, there's actually one more little mount right here
for a 3.5 or a 2.5. I've heard online, though,
that apparently if you have a full 420 millimeter radiator,
here, fitting a 3.5 drive might be a little tough,
but the fact that you can fit a 420 millimeter radiator in an MATX case is kind of wild already.
Now that I've torn it all apart, it's time to build a PC in it. Before I even start, not super happy.
All the screws are just in one baggy that I just have to sift through.
In goes our motherboard. We got an MATX. We're gonna try to fit as...
Wait, I went to put the motherboard and I was putting it like this way
because I'm figuring this is the back. No, the IO's gotta go at the top.
We got our MATX ASUS board here,
with a Ryzen 7900X. Line it all up.
Oh. You might have to be careful about that.
This standoff is actually not on this motherboard. There's no hole right there,
which means if I had screwed that down, I could have shorted the board. So I'm gonna have to remove my center standoff here.
Your motherboard may vary on that, but you might wanna double check before you start building.
There we go, oh, I dropped it. I'll get it later.
There we go, now it's resting on all the standoffs. Oh, I forgot to put the SSD in.
Oh, actually, nevermind, it's right there.
Boop. Man, having this case so open like this
makes it just so easy to work in. Oh, it's great.
Man, it's got the radiator support, but it's got all the room for a big cooler.
Which one do you guys wanna do?
Yeah, okay, we'll go with Noctua.
Make sure you install your cooler backplate before you put the motherboard in.
Otherwise, you gotta do a little bit of finagling, but through those thumb screws,
you can actually remove the hard drive mount. So that's kinda good.
Then we get all the access to the back panel there.
Oh, there we go. This is a chonker of a cooler.
I need to put thermal paste on. One moment, please.
Thanks, Belle. All righty.
Apparently, this case supports up to 210 millimeter tall coolers, which is very large,
again, for a small form factor case. And the airflow goes from bottom up,
so we're still gonna wanna position our fan this way.
It blocks the GPU. Well, that was a fun experiment to see
that it will fit the air cooler, but we're removing it because if you look closely,
you can actually kind of see that the cooler here
is cutting off the GPU riser, so we won't be able to slot our GPU in.
You know what? I feel like I should just go with liquid cooling.
Let's open this up. All right, now let's take out the removable bracket
and slide our radiator bracket out. Dang, it fit a lot of radiator in this bad boy.
There's also another radiator slot. You could take out the fans here and put it up top.
We're gonna pounce it on the side. It's gonna look a little nicer that way.
I think the best part about this radiator install, boom, once you got it in there,
it's just those two screws again. If I wanted to cable manage it behind,
it's a little tough there. Well, thankfully, take off this radiator.
Just like that. This is gonna be such a small nitpick.
But if you're gonna go through the trouble of coloring the inside of your case,
why can't you color the PCIe brackets? Oh, there we go.
Woo, that might be one of these snugest fits
I have ever had to do for a GPU.
I actually kind of like the look of that.
Time to start closing up some panels here. Boom, hide my lack of cable management.
All right, well, that went on super easy.
Oh, there's magnets. It's kind of nice, actually.
I didn't even realize that when I took them off. Man, I love this GPU orientation.
I think it's the reason I love these tower series so much.
As GPUs have gotten heavier and heavier, they've all started to sag, right,
when they're on your motherboard. There's no sag with this. It takes all the stress off of it.
One more thing, just before we finish up, we gotta swap out our front panel.
You get the screen, it goes on there. Two little screw holes.
That should be nice and easy. How does this screen come off? Oh, man, all tool is, oh, oh, that looks cute.
$90 for the screen, though. Maybe not worth it, but I think it looks cool.
One thing I was just gonna ask, you know how it's bad heebies to like close the side panel before you boot?
Which side panel? There's eight of them.
There we go.
Oh, yeah. Dang.
Oh, man, I love this so much. We'll see how it looks when it turns on. Moment of truth.
One moment, please.
Moment of deuce. There we go.
Whoa, the screen. Oh, yeah, no thermotec logo.
One thing to point out, we actually have these radiator fans pushing out the side here.
Normally, on their website, they describe it as pulling in the sides, pulling in the bottom, and then out the top and back.
But that's how they came installed on this rad, so. Man, I think this is in the end
why I just love the thermotec tower designs. It takes your traditional PC and flips it on its side.
Speaking of which, for $30, oh, it's kind of a chunker.
You can actually lay it.
Oh, yeah.
That looks awesome. The $30 kit does come with a color match bottom,
but we ordered the hydrangea blue one, so it doesn't quite match our build.
I mean, we could take the top off that one and put it here if we wanted to, and then we got two blue caps.
But I think the sideways look is honestly
maybe the way to go for this if you have the desk base. That's a big ask.
Big desk is what you need to get this working.
I think it looks really cool on the side, though. Overall, I actually really enjoyed building this,
but again, I might have a little bias building in the tower systems before.
And being this kind of unique case, you're either gonna love it or hate it.
Thankfully, it does out that customization if you want to go vertical or horizontal.
For $150 US dollars, I think the price is actually totally reasonable personally
for a case that definitely had to go under a lot of R&D
to make it all work like this. Having eight different color options
is really cool as well. You can do so many different kind of themed builds.
You can maybe make this one like Diva from Overwatch or Bumblebee from Transformers.
I love the different colors instead of just a typical white and black
that we're used to. Make sure you guys like, comment, subscribe. If you're looking for another weird case to look at,
maybe look at the one Ploof built. It was called the POC. It's like origami.
Kind of weird.