ThermalTake Armor JR Case Review :: Overview

So what do you get out of the rather large box? Well the case of course, the Armor design shows through with the modular front control panel, extensive use of mesh for the bay covers as well as the prominent front cooling fan. It also retains the two armored quarter doors that cover the front of the case. This works well enough to help prevent damage to both your optical drives and the remaining mesh grills should something every accidently run into the front of the case. While in a home environment you're not likely to gain any real benefit from this. It does come in handy at LAN parties where other people may stumble into your system. The case features an optional BTX upgrade kit should you find that you need it.

Once inside the case we see that the basic layout of this case is clean and simple with, a modular hard drive rack and ample room for optical drives. One thing that this, like many other cases, struggles with is fitting in higher end video cards. Many of today's high end video cards can extend beyond the length of the motherboard. This makes fitting them in a mid-tower case a tight prospect and in some cases it just does not work to put them in.

The hard drive cage includes a pre mounted 120mm cooling fan to provide enough air flow to keep even a fully populated rack cool. This is actually a very nice feature as hard drives especially under load can generate an excessive amount of heat, getting rid of it quickly insures longer hard drive life and even data integrity, an overheated drive tends to not read so well.

At the back of the case we see another 120mm fan as well as a tool less retention setup for all your expansion cards. Again with the large fans you can get a lot of air flow with very little noise. The more air flow you have the better and longer all of your hardware will run.

Up top we have a clean looking door that houses your easily accessible USB, Fire wire and audio ports. Most case manufactures have a tendency to put these accessories on the bottom front of the case. Having them on top makes them far more easily accessible. Just one more in a long list of nice innovations this case contains.

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