Thermaltake Core V1 mITX Chassis Review

The rear is standard stuff, but as we said earlier we are not a fan of the 80mm fans if you pardon the pun! The GPU screw cover is plastic, adding to that slightly cheaper feel. If you remember to bear the price in mind throughout, you will soon admire what you get for your cash.

Here is the bottom of the drives area, you can just see the second SSD facing inwards. There is plenty of opportunity to cable manage in this area, brought to life by the removal of the floor panel.

With the chassis exposed you can see how we managed to get a full length high end graphics card installed. With a little intelligence from Thermaltake helping us we could use the gap designed for longer cards. It is an excellent feature and means the chassis can be used for higher end rigs without fear of a mid-range card being installed.

You will be able to water cool the graphics card, this is a double slot card and fits in fine. There are a lot of areas around the chassis that will be key for cable management and WC loops if desired and the all-round removable panels aids this perfectly.

Conclusion

The Thermaltake Core V1 is getting a lot of praise and top level awards around the net and we are no different. For under £40 in the UK you will receive a chassis that has a cheaper feel, what chassis doesn’t for under £40, but has some show stopping features and compatibility with high end components.

You can argue you cannot get an X99 mITX motherboard but MSI and other manufactures are producing some amazing Z97 mITX motherboards.

Install 16Gb of DDR3, a PNY XLR8 GeForce GTX 770, a GTX780 or the shorter MSI GTX 970 GAMING Twin Frozr V, a couple of SSD in RAID and not many people could argue with that.

So what are the concerns? Some of the panels are thin and it’s only currently available in black. We have mixed views on chassis colour around the office with my preference being with white. With that said, black suits this chassis well and when we think about it, so would white and even red.

Plastic feet on a hard surface or desk may cause vibration, it may be something to remember and purchase some felt or rubber isolators to help if this happens. In reality, and although we have mentioned this before, the price of this chassis means it is going to have some elements that you won’t like, but it will charm you into forgetting about them, we did.

Final Thoughts

LAN rig, SteamBox or just pushed for space in your game room, there are a lot of chassis that do it well enough, this little chassis beats some of the more expensive competition in a lot of areas, and compared to its price range, not much can touch it.