| Thermaltake Shark Case: Part I - Product Outlook | Today's Top Stories | ||||||||||||
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Page 3 of 7 Product Analysis:
The front door of the Shark is more form than function, unfortunately. The fins at the bottom of the door, as well as the silver grill to the left, look like they have some sort of purpose besides aesthetics, but they don’t. The door is almost entirely solid and doesn’t allow much, if any, air to flow to the front intake fan located directly behind it. Although this is one of the only negative aspects of the Shark, it’s quite a significant one. If you want the intake fan to function properly, you’ll have to keep the front door open.
Those of you who are into displaying the inside of your computer or the blue LED in the exhaust fan will appreciate the see-through mesh on the side of the case. Unlike the front door, this feature is more function than form. According to Thermaltake, it acts as an EMI (Electro Magnetic Interference) shield. Upon close examination, it appears that Thermaltake have sprayed a kind of substance on the back of the mesh in order to achieve this, but we are not sure what material they used. Although we are disappointed that a side intake fan isn’t an option, air will be passively moved into the case through this mesh because the Shark has negative air pressure. This is due to the fact that there is only one intake fan and two exhausts (an exhaust fan identical to the intake, and the fan from your power supply). More air is moving out of the case than in, so the pressure must equalize by drawing air into the case through the mesh.
You can clearly see that the inside of the front door has no grill on it, completely obstructing any airflow that the front intake fan receives. If you are depending on that fan to properly cool your high performance SATA or SCSI drives, you are out of luck unless you keep the front door open. We’re really not sure why Thermaltake decided to design the door this way, but hopefully they will release a version of the Shark that fixes this problem. Besides that glaring flaw, the front door is pleasant to work with. It’s difficult to see, but you may notice the screw on the door at the bottom left of the picture. This screw acts as a very weak magnet that connects to the tiny metallic spot on the bottom right of the case. The magnetic force between the two keeps the door closed. We should stress that the magnet is rather weak; we didn’t even notice it until half way through the evaluation process. The magnet is barely able to keep the door closed, but if they had designed it any stronger, it could interfere with your hard drives. It’s actually a pretty clever design, regardless its functionality. The power and reset buttons are nothing special, but we should mention that when pressed, the power button moves back in a completely uniform fashion and doesn’t twist at all. If you look at the external drive bays, visible in the picture, you’ll notice indentations directly to the right and left of each of them. These modest finger holes are key to the Shark’s most impressive feature. |
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