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Printed On: | May 10, 2008, 5:32 am |
| Category: | Cooling & Chassis | |
| Type: | Reviews | |
| Posted By: | floppy | |
| Date Posted: | March 13, 2008, 3:59 am |
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Silverstone TJ10 - Temjin Revolution
The enthusiast community has seen how Silverstone sprouted from a startup to a premier designer of premium cases, which caters to gamers and overclockers alike. It has been a while since the ATCS design team left Coolermaster to setup SIlverstonetek, but they have always kept their credo at their fingertips, which is to perfect airflow in enthusiast cases. For the uninitiated, ATCS actually stands for Active Thermal Convection System.
The majority of their first generation cases balanced between functionality and aesthetics, as we can see from the TJ01, 02 and 04. The TJ03 is the odd one out, featuring E-ATX support, full aluminium chassis with a classy outlook. Silverstone has realised that the techies around the world are viewing them as a premium brand, and thus as of late, they are spending more effort to realise the potential of this market, rolling out the TJ07, TJ09 and subsequently, the TJ10.Over the years, we've also seen the company iron out kinks in order to perfect airflow, functionality as well as ergonomics on their cases, which is evidently shown on their latest creations, the Silverstone TJ09 and TJ10.
As of late, Nvidia and her partners have decided that it's time to introduce a full feature set that's catered to the enthusiast who is very concerned about their system, with the need to constantly monitor every aspect of their system, including voltage rails on their power supplies, fan speeds, temperatures of various regions in their systems. This led to the unprecendented launch of the ESA Technology, which stands for Enthusiast System Architecture. Apart from your usual CPU and case fans, the ESA system architecture also allows you to directly monitor voltage rails real time on power supplies, pump status on watercooling kits, chassis fans status via a special USB connector that is available on ESA certified devices. With the launch of ESA late last year, we have seen various chassis manufacturers rolling out ESA Certified Chassis, such as the Coolermaster Cosmos 1000 ESA and Thermaltake Armor+ ESA. Today, we will be taking a look at Silverstone's take on ESA Technology with the TJ-10 ESA.
The forefathers of cases with stealthed doors, the ATCS-110, which led to the development of the Temjin TJ03, and subsequently the TJ10. Picture courtesy of 3dnews.ru
An overview of ESA, more information can be obtained at Nvidia's ESA Microsite.
Some basic specifications -
ESA Spec
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The Case
The case is exactly the same on the exterior as compared to the original TJ-10
The Side Vents
Top 2x 120mm fans, great for watercoolers who's looking for fitting a big ass 2x120mm fan radiator
Pop Out I/O ports
The front with doors open
The back, with the usual perforated PCI covers
For your watercooling needs.
Audio-grade feets to dampen vibration.
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The Insides
The HDD Rack with it's unconventional airflow, where air flows from bottom to top to cool the hard drives.
The 120mm fan that's in charge of pushing air via the side vents of the case, with an elaborate fan guard to prevent wires from being caught in it.
The ESA Circuit board. It comes equipped with fan control of up to 5 fans up to 0.5a, 3x CCFL or other device which you can switch on or off up to 0.8a and 4x thermal sensor connectors. The fan speeds and CCFL lights power can be adjusted and switched on/off via Nvidia's Software ESA Control panel.
3x 8800GTX installed, with more than ample space for even longer cards.
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The Bling
Case in full bling. instead of the boring all black fans that came with the TJ10, Silverstone has chosen to install 5x super-silent 120mm fans with green leds in the case to suit Nvidia's theme green. Cables for the fans are also nicely managed by default with cable holders installed. Great work by Silverstone there, which spares the enthusiast some trouble managing cables. The fans are silent and are pretty weak, pushing a bit less air than what i expected.
3/4 view
With Side Panel on.
Essentially, the TJ10 ESA is Silverstone's collaboration with almighty Nvidia in regards to achieving ESA certification, and apart from the ESA control board and replacing the fans with green leds, there's essentially no innovation at all. 0.5a per channel for fan power is definitely measly, as we can see, many gamers will like to switch their fans to highway mode during gaming, where noise isn't too much of a concern with either their headphones on or 5.1 speakers blasting and stability is a major concern. Most of the rheobus/ multi fan control panels available in the market now supports up to 1.5a of power per channel.
The price difference between the TJ10 and the ESA version currently stands at a whopping 60 bucks USD. The convenience of being able to control all your thermal and bling devices via a simple software control panel is definitely appealing to many end-users, but sadly this piece of innovation isn't gonna move enthusiast much as whatever that can be done via ESA can also be done via a simple rheobus device(which probably costs less and looks just as nice on your 5.25" bays, too). We've seen mixed feelings about ESA across the web, with critics slamming the technology as gimmicky, and the supporters citing ESA as an novelty and innovative. We were unable to get ESA to function in full swing due to the lack of ESA components in our labs.
Nevertheless, the Silverstone TJ10 case is still a fantastic case designed by the enthusiast for the enthusiast, and to run it down because of an unworthy component within is definitely shameful. The TJ10 is definitely one of the best case to hold your Tri-SLI gaming monster, and will still be in the many months to come.
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