Closer Look: Interior

Next, let's take a three-quarter view looking from the back to the front. Here we see the front bays and the hard drive cage, and please note: The hard drive cage is not removable. Not being able to remove the hard drive cage has its cons, but one of those cons isn't any pratical decrease in space. The THOR V2 has space, man. Lots of it, and I'll demonstrate that later on. Again, we see the top 230mm fan. We can now see the clear front 230mm fan, which is lit with red LEDs. Next to the fan we have the drive tray, which shows the relative size of this behemoth. It's almost 23" tall.

Now we're looking at the motherboard tray straight on against a white background. You can see clearly that this case's internals are money. There are twelve, that's TWELVE, cable routing ports here. The routing holes are large, well placed, and they make good Frisbees too. You'll be able to test that out yourself, because Rosewill saved .000001 cents by not gluing them on. They popped off on me until I got pissed and flug them through the door of my studio to the front room. That's when I discovered their Frisbee like properties. It's not everyday you get a computer case with built-in removable Frisbees. The good news is that even without the rubber gaskets, the holes are smooth, and that goes for the power supply guide hole and retainer hole too, which can be used to run small wires through. That brings the total wire/cable port possibility to fourteen. Nice! Last, the motherboard tray is not removable.

Looking into the case from the bottom, we see, again, the 230mm fan. We also see the THOR V2's guts hanging out. Have you ever wondered why they color coded USB 3 blue? If you know, please tell me. We also have a a look at the hard drive cage, sans it's drive carriages. The front fan looks like a tight fit, but I removed it and replaced it easily. Have a look at the front bay "tool-less" sliders. I say "tool-less" in quotes because these here are "tool-less" looking sliders.

That’s right. My Rosewill supplied case came with front bay tool-less drive mounts that don’t work. Oh yes, they slide and snap, but the design tolerance is so lacking, the rear pegs didn’t go into the drive’s rear screw holes. If you have this case, try messing with the drive once you have it in. I’ll bet you can lift the rear of it up with just a little pressure, or none at all. I’m sorry to have to say this, but these front bay mounts are what comes out of horses’ butts. The good news is that you can screw your drives down. I’ve always done that anyway, since DVD writers tend to vibrate, and some pretty badly. Not a big deal, really, but why even include something that doesn’t work? Maybe just to say, “We got ‘em too?” I was not happy. Rosewill almost got to say hello to my little friend.

Here’s what the inside looks like completely filled out. I swapped my system out of my Cooler Master Stacker 830 evo into the THOR V2 case. Why, you might ask? Because although it isn’t as polished a case as the Stacker series, it’s much more simplistic and utilitarian. The fan system in the THOR V2 is second to none and incredibly simple. Although my CPU doesn't run any cooler compared to the 830's already excellent cooling features, I'm only using four fans to the Stacker's seven, and that cleans things up in itself. So here you go. Check out how much space this case has. The white box shows that all of the power supply's cables went through the hole, plus room to spare. Don’t be hatin’ on my BFG GTX 295 vid card either.

Here’s another look at the power supply's cables going out of the cable port. If you look closely at the left of the port, you can see another half inch or so of space. If I had all of my output cables from my power supply connected, I’d still have room enough to run them all out of this hole, easily. As you can see, only two are left unused.

Here’s what the side mount 230mm fan looks like. It mounts to rubber dampeners and, as all the fans in this case, uses a screw down mounting method. The fan is rated at .24A and 2.88W, and 800RPMs.

I don’t know if this is the deal with all 230mm fans, but it is with this one. You can see that the only insulation between bare solder mounts and a short circuit is a sticker. This probably is of no concern, but like all little cost cutting manufacturing secrets, it’s worth mentioning. I'd also like to metion that you can hear an almost imperceptable scraping noise coming from these 230mm fans that is worse horizontally (but the top fan is hardly perceptible, and it's horozontal all of the time). It comes and goes according to speed and position, but it is there. It's also about the same level and type of noise no matter what the speed. I took one of them out and put my ear against the center axis and very slowly turned the fan. I could hear the bearing click, click, cliking. I should add too that these fan's acoustic signature is almost dead silent, even at full speed. You can hear the air against the blades, but it's a nice, low pitched hum, and again, very quite. So there you go. I don't like the scraping or bearing sound, even if they are almost imperceptible. Mayby all 230mm fans do this, I don't kinow because these are the first I've ever owned. If you have any information, please comment in the comment section.

This is the front panel cable port we looked at on the top of the case, when Thor had his haircut. This is a nice, simple, easy to get at design.

For our last image before we get into the detailed interior section, I wanted to show you what holds the screens on. They’re little metal tabs simply bent over the edge. I thought, “Uh oh, this is gonna allow the side vent holes to rattle (the three vents above the side 230mm fan). I picked up the panel and tapped it. Sure enough, rattle, rattle, rattle. Wow. That’s kind of a let down after doing so well. A rattle trap side panel. You could fix that easy enough by applying a little hot glue, but the good news is—you don’t need to. The case doesn’t rattle at all. It’s nice and quite. Anyway, here’s what they look like, and this is on the front panel mounting the filter, but this is how all the panels are mounted.

That’s it for the Internal Closer Look. Let’s get into the details now. So far I think Rosewill has done a decent job of balancing cost and quality. What was surprising is how well designed the internal aspects of the THOR V2 were, including how much space it has.

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