Thermaltake Core V51 Mid-Tower PC Case Review

CASE ASSEMBLY

Assembling the PC in this case wasn’t very difficult. All around there was plenty of room to work with. However, one thing to note would be that most of the thumbscrews inside the case were difficult to impossible to remove with my finger strength, especially the HDD cage thumbscrews.

Installing a Thermaltake Water 3.0 Ultimate cooler was a breeze. With the Asus Maximus VI Extreme there were no clearance issues and the cooler could be installed using the centered mounting slots.

Cable routing was also easy in this case, with the grommet cable pass through holes and space behind the back panel, cables can be bundled together for zip-tied tidiness. When connecting SATA cables to the hard drives, there was a slight clearance issue with 90 degree connectors, straight SATA cable connectors are suggested to connect to drives. 

Furthermore, to show what it would look like with an air cooler, we installed a Cooler Master T4. There is a 185mm height limit for CPU coolers in this chassis.

USER NOTES AND TESTING

SYSTEM COMPONENTS

This Test Bench build was the result of some great relationships and purchase; our appreciation goes to the below mentioned manufacturers for their support in our project. All of the components we use for testing and evaluation can be easily purchased at a relatively affordable price. The links provided below can assist in pricing, as well as availability for those of you who may find interest in our equipment.

THERMAL

In this part of the review we will be testing the cooling ability of the case in order to give our readers a rough idea of what to expect. The GPU will be stressed and temperatures will be monitored with FurMark. At the same time, the CPU will be stressed and temperatures of the CPU and motherboard will be monitored with AIDA64 Engineer. In order to view the hard drive temperature, it will be stressed via a “0” write pass and monitored with AIDA64 Engineer. All stress tests will be run at the same time for a duration of 30 minutes. The idle and load temperatures will be recorded and graphed.

Environment Temperature: 25C

As can be seen above, the Core V51 is able to deliver adequate airflow to components even under full load.

NOISE

While we are unable to record any decibel readings, based upon my ear, the case is near silent. Sitting just two feet away from the PC case on my desk, the HDD is the loudest part in the system. Even when the system was under full load. The stock fans do a decent job in moving air while keeping quiet.

REPORT ANALYSIS AND FINAL THOUGHTS

The Thermaltake Core V51 has ridiculous support for water cooling options and the ability to support large Extended ATX motherboards. After reviewing it for myself, I have to agree with Thermaltake, that the Core V51 is “an enthusiast’s grade mid-tower that creates unprecedented space for high-end hardware and liquid cooling expansion.”

The very adjustable design is very well thought out by Thermaltake. It allows for a many different configurations for air cooling and if you are more of a water cooling type of guy, this case has support for even some of the largest radiators out.

That being said the case is also very quiet with my current configuration and the case does a good job staying quiet while still having lots of ventilation.

It did have some quirks however. The front of case needs to be removed to clean the front bottom dust filter which makes cleaning more difficult and could have been designed a bit better with this in mind.

The Plexiglas side window scratches easily and a scratch resistant coating would have been very beneficial since scratches take away from showing off your components. Thumbscrews make tool-less removal difficult, which is the whole point of having thumbscrews.

The PSU mounting bracket is difficult to adjust and could have been implemented better which brings me on to my final gripe and probably the most important to you. The hard foam packaging is not something we’d feel comfortable shipping out with a system built inside it and also allows damage during shipping to have a better chance of occurring.

All in all, these are some minor gripes and is a very nice case with some great design choices.  We believe the Thermaltake Core V51 worthy of our Gold Seal as it has a great pricepoint, great window visability and system installation is accomplished with ease.

Check out the Thermaltake Core V51 on Amazon Today!