Thermaltake Urban T81 Full Tower Case Review @ [H]

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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Thermaltake Urban T81 Full Tower Case Review - Thermaltake has designed what it calls a, "creation of modernism." The Urban T81 chassis looks to support excellent air cooling, excellent water cooling, with a fully modular interior design. While Thermaltake has produced some wacky looking cases in the past, the Urban T81 is not of that realm, but rather sports a very sleek and clean exterior look.
 
Need more 9 or 10 expansion slots supported. Most reviews are 7 or 8. Prefer 10 but will settle with 9.
 
Sli and phyxs and extra cooling. Seems cases exclude the hard core user. You need those slots for bigger motherboards. Seems most companies neglect to include more expansion slots and good cooling such as video card fans for air flow. Not against case designers just want more options than regular 8 slot expansion which we see most of the time.
 
I used a Urban S41 for my latest Media Center build/upgrade a while back. Using the power light bar in place of the hard drive light works great as far as aesthetics go (no blinding blue lights or ugly red hd light). Fans on low with 5 hard drives, an ssd, passive HD6450, and a i3 3225 passively cooled with a Mini Ninja worked out great.

I think the T81 will be the next case that I will use when the time comes.
 
Hi Night_Hawk-19,

What exactly would you use more than 8 slots for as even the largest boards in length top to bottom fit just fine.

maybe I missed one but 4 way boards should have no issue fitting at all here, so what can we do to better meet what you are looking for?

Extra slots for cooling will not really help much if you are talking ventilation, however we do allow adjacent to the slots a large vented area to enable venting or exhausting of excess heat from massive card arrays.

That was part of the initial planning when we designed this planning.

I am always open to feedback form the community so fire away and I have an open ear :)
 
I have had this case for a while now, love the over all looks and size of it. I have had a horrible problem with the fan controller, the PCB caught fire. Thermaltake sent me a replacement parts the new fan controller works but the power button was damage when it arrived.
 
some 8 slot full tower cases may fit xl atx boards but the lack of expansion slots prohibit the use of the bottom most pci-e slots. additionally, this problem isn't exclusive to xl atx boards as some standard atx boards are also designed with a pci-e slot placed right above the front panel jumpers. a user wouldn't be able to use a typical dual height graphics card because there isn't a 9th available expansion slot to accommodate the graphics card air vent. this arrangement is particularly problematic for users of r9 290/290x crossfire. without the need for crossfire bridges, we can place our excessively hot cards as far apart as our boards and cases will allow. in fact, we often need to space out the cards as far as we can. the above mentioned scenario is why the corsair 800d has aged poorly as an enthusiast case as the lack of expansion slots prohibit the use of the bottom most pci-e slot on my sabertooth 990fx board.
 
I really like that the top panel has so many USB ports available. And mounts for 2x 200mm fans too.
 
I am not "firing away" but having Reps of 2 majors brands on the same thread is too good pass up.

As a case designer, what do you use all the slots for?

Good point. Why go for, 8, 9 or (God forbid!) 10 expansions slot?
While the HPTX EVGA SR-2 only need 7 PCIE, truth is smaller MOBOs have been designed dislocating the top most expansion slot, in order to increase the free space around the CPU. So if i am mounting something like MSI Z87 Xpower i NEED at minimum, 9 expansions slots or i lose access to the bottom X16 slot. The 10th slot on the case may feel overkill, but as long as cases with 10 slots are on the wild, MOBO designers can play with the idea of displacing the slots further down or even create 8 slots desings. a perfect TRI-SLi mobo would be soemthing like this:
vacant slot; x16; 2 vacant slots; x16; 2 vacant slots; x16; 2 vacant slots. If you count, a case for such a mobo would require at least 10 expansions slots.

And that is before we consider SWTX mobos like these:
14093392910_a3093b6081_o.jpg


This is a Supermicro quad Xeon mobo measuring 16.4" x 16.79" (41.66cm x 42.65cm) inside a Rosewill "Blackcock" Ultra.
The slot placement is out of sinc with the ATX standard, so occasionally there will be a need for more than 7 expansions slots to properly fit a server mobo on a prosumer case.

That picture teaches us more things about case/ cooling and PSU designs:

Why the builder used Krakens 40?
Because Krakens have 16" of tubing, while Corsair's H90 only 11". That is the reason why the tubing looks so curved and oversized. Better a bent tube than a tube that doesn't reach the CPU.

Why isn't he using 240 or 280 radiators?

Because even in such a gigantic case it is not possible to install a PSU and a 240/280 rad side by side. On this particular case the culprit is the PSU, that goes beyond the usual 160mm deep. Again we need something like the now impossible to find Nexus Nx6300 r3 a 600w PSU with 82%+ efficiency only 125mm deep. Or follow at least EVGA and give us a 1000w modular PSU 160mm deep.
The way i see it, as it is possible to fit a 135mm fan inside a 150mm deep PSU, 150mm is the optimum size for an ATX PSU.

My point is: a case should be able to fit both a 280mm rad AND a PSU on the bottom. And the top should, at minimum, fit a 420mm rad, ideally another PSU + another 280mm rad. Either give us shorter PSUs or longer cases.

140mm rads suck, they are worst than a mid-range air cooler.

And another problem with the Urban T81: it is not wise to mount a radiator beside the drive cage: the rad is either taking hot air from inside the case or dumping hot air inside it. It is a beautiful case, but having the dimensions of a full tower it could be able to fit bigger mobos, not just EATX.
 
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I just read the review of this case, I have a few quick questions:

1) the cables from the front panels, such as hard drive light, soft reset, etc. are they color or are they all in 1 color only?

2) the top panel, there doesn't look like there is a real mesh filter, can we manually add a thin 3rd party filter, would there be enough space?

3) the 2nd x 200 mm fan at the top, any 3rd party fan will fit?
 
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