Every Rose has its Thorns…

…And this case has a good number more than it should. While the TJ05 has excellent features on paper, there are also several flaws present, including the optical drive rails, the 120mm fans, the hard drive cage, and the VGA cooler/hard drive holder plate.

While a good idea on paper, the drive rails for the optical disk drives maintain a very slack grip. All they permit is a rough holding of the CD-drive which can allow excessive vibration. On the plus side, its much less difficult to remove these trays than in the previous model. In addtion,  there are holes available to attach the drive directly to the chassis. While on the subject of drives, the rails on the hard drives work wonderfully-but the hard drive cage is quite difficult to remove. Held in place with a thumb screw that is difficult to grip due to its location, excessive friction between the floppy drive cage and the mounting plate for the hard drive cage make excessive tugging necessary to remove it from the chassis. In addition, rounded cables to the hard drives are pressed a tad tight against the side of the chassis due to the close proximity of the side panel; some minor adjustments in the depth between the 80mm intake mount and the cage in general could solve this problem

Far from the 21 Decibels claimed by Silverstone, the fans included with the case are very loud. I don’t know what kind of conditions that measurement was derived from, but in practice they are much louder. We would really like to see fans that under normal operating parameters run at 21 decibels; these fans run at  no-where near their advertised noise output levels.

The one final significant problem is in the side hard drive/VGA cooler panel. While the plate for holding fans will do that job well, and hold extra hard drives, the PCI device grips are worthless. Instead of pressing against the edge of the PCB, the clips merely brush the edge of the PCB and instead press against board components, such as my graphics card’s power molex.