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SilverStone TJ10 Case Review :: Overview
The TJ10 is a well constructed case built using light weight aluminum. Being a full tower it is designed to support both standard ATX as well as extended ATX motherboards. It also offers a host of cooling options. The front of the case is kept simple and clean with no garish plastics or exposed ports to take away from the clean elegant appearance.  Behind the front aluminum door there is room for four optical drives as well as one 3.5 inch device such as a floppy drive or card reader. The nice thing about having a door is that it conceals any drives you may have that do not match the case itself, again adding to the clean un-obtrusive look of the case.  Moving up top we find a flip up door that hides two USB ports as well as front audio and Fire wire ports. Again, well thought out engineering went into this design the housing for the ports is sturdy and very solid. Aesthetically the door is also pleasing; when it is closed it becomes all but invisible.  Moving across the top we find a large mesh grill that hides two 120mm fans. The first thing that comes to mind here is. Where does the power supply go? But more on the power supply later. With the dual 120mm fans on top, the case is able to vent quite a bit of heat from the inside of the case. This allows the inside of the chassis to remain at near room temperature.  Moving inside we can see that Silverstone chose not use a tool less retention mechanism to secure the optical drives. This holds true throughout the inside of the case. A definite minus on the case.  The TJ10 supports the installation of up to six hard drives in its two removable hard drive racks. Again you need to use screws to secure the drives rather than rails but beyond that the design of the hard drive bay is superb. The drives are mounted vertically this allows air to flow over the drives and dissipate out of the side mesh grills. A 120mm fan placed in-between the two hard drive racks ensures there is plenty of air flow to keep the drives cool. Though it is not apparent in the picture there is a mesh covered opening on the bottom of the case to allow air in.    In these two shot we can see Silverstone’s engineers at work again. By isolating the drive bay with a solid wall, The case forces the heat created by the drives to vent out of the case then With yet another 120mm fan drawing air in from two side air ducts, the case is able to provide constant cool fresh air to the video card. This actually translated into tangible performance results in that our video cards ran four degrees Celsius cooler.  In another interesting move, Silverstone has places the power supply on the bottom of the case. This does several things for you. First it takes a high heat output item like the power supply and moves it as far away from the CPU as you can get. Second it gives the power supply a fresh air source to allow it to run cooler. Third it creates more space up top to allow for more exotic cooling. And finally it actually allows for better cable management. A very interesting feature that I hope makes it onto more cases in the future.  At the back of the case you can see yet another 120mm case fan so that is a total of four 120mm fans providing air flow throughout the case. It is easy to see why systems in this case run so cool; there is literally no place for a hot spot to develop. Another nice feature is that this entire part of the case is removable, giving you easy access to the installation and maintenance of your motherboard and other key components.
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