ThermalTake Tenor (contd) - HTPC 4-Way Roundup

Publish date: 2024-06-06
ThermalTake Tenor (cont'd)

Despite the openness of the case, the installation of our test bed into the Tenor was rather frustrating, mainly because we kept making assumptions about what would fit and we were wrong. The first snarl involved our 5¼" optical drive.


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It's much easier to install the 5¼" from the front of the case, and in these two shots, you can see how well an optical drive in the bottom position works.


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This concept is by far the most universally acceptable stealthy solution, as it doesn't matter what the optical drive's configuration looks like at all. So far, so good...

First, we decided to try installing the hard drive in the third (internal only) position of the 3½" bay. The cage itself is very easy to remove and install components.


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However, after placing the cage back in place and testing to see if the motherboard would fit, we realized that putting the CD drive into the bottom position rendered it impossible to put the motherboard in at all! The visible standoff isn't actually in the proper place to fit our motherboard in this picture, but it does help to get an idea of how much further the motherboard needs to move to get into position.

If a smaller motherboard was used, perhaps this wouldn't be a problem, but it still frustrates us that the best bay to put the CD drive into is the most problematic. Moving our drive to the top position was also a problem though, as the push-button door couldn't close then. Granted, our drive's bezel is thicker than most, but not by that much. The middle slot worked luckily, but after settling on this position and trying the motherboard again, we ran into snarl number two.


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The hard drive in any position in the triple 3½" cage would make it impossible to plug in our motherboard's ATX power connector. Again, this is a problem that only applies to particular components, but this is a relatively popular location for the motherboard power, so it's still a bit of a problem.

Again though, the Tenor comes through with its wealth of options and gives us another choice. We moved the hard drive to the left brace (which includes two slots for hard drives), visible upside-down in the picture here.


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Sliding the power supply into place couldn't be easier. This is one aspect of the Tenor that easily trumps the other cases looked at in this review, especially since size isn't an issue really at all in this configuration.

With motherboard, power supply, and the left-side brace in place, this is what the case now looks like.


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