Gadgetory

well good people the new level 20 series from Thermaltake is finally here I have the level 20 VT which is a micro text enclosure at $99 I'm excited to see this whole micro Tech's popularity rising but let's say if this case is for you right after this all right so the level 20 series spends the entire spectrum of motherboard sizes I am happy that I have the VT version for micro TX motherboards because anything that stands for the ATX and ATX motherboards is just way too big for me I don't do water cooling and obviously those larger cases are designed to house like really gigantic radiators and tons of water cooling equipment and that's just on something that I'm into but I am actually quite interested in the VT because micro ATX popularity is growing we recently reviewed the courser - ATX which is quite nice but side to side comparison you can see that VTE is bulkier it's wider is taller but also because it can accommodate a lot more for water cooling hardware and so it's not exactly a fair comparison size-wise but you know it's bulky enough so that you can put a lot of things into it and not be cramped for space now design wise I actually quite liked it the dark grey color scheme the glass paneling and it's like smooth exterior it almost Slim's it down so in comparison to something a little bit more edgy like a - ATX I actually like the level 20 VT more now the cool thing about this micro ATX layout is that the motherboard is flat which means you can see an entire system from all four sides which is kind of cool so you approach that from a visual perspective first in terms of how you gonna mount your water cooling components or if you go in with air cooling and where you can mount certain fans for the entire system to shine a little bit extra but of course that front glass piece is a bit of a concern especially because that's spacing between the glass and the filter behind it and then the actual frame is not that deep and I'll show you the temperatures later but yeah it is a concern now behind the front panel is our 200 millimeter fan it is mounted outside of the frame and if you want to have a little bit extra spacing I'd recommend you mounted internally but this space can also accommodate dual 120 or 140 motor fans with their respective radiators and one thing to keep in mind are those IO cables and how they exit from the bottom but the good thing is you can route them from any of the four large cutouts on that frame so if you need to route them sort of around certain fans in one directions or the other you have the ability to do so the ILO is pretty standard it is at the top and it's attached to the actual frame which is awesome so when you remove all the paneling you don't have to reroute all the cabling again but it is pretty widespread and you have to take that into account when you know doing all your cables below the top glass panel we find four fan brackets which are actually pretty clever I do like this implementation so not only are they labeled for left and right to avoid confusion when reinstalling them back into the case but you also have markings for 120 and 140 Miller fans so you could do a 280 or 240 rod on each bracket there are also two lists so installation is much easier and not only can they be installed at the top they can also be installed on the side the catch however are the side panels because only one of them is slightly spaced out to allow for airflow intake or exhaust so you have to make up your mind whether or not you're installing radiator or fans on the top or on either sides because you cannot install the flat panels when the side bracket is installed because just like it doesn't fit whereas the spaced one it is designed to fit no problem on top of those brackets I do like this flexibility but it does corner you into using only one of the three sides for airflow while the others will be completely sort of shot with those glass panels and you cannot purchase the additional spaced out side panels just yet but if you do let Thermaltake know now I don't particularly like the side panel attachment the thumb screws are nice the little ridge at the front is nice to cache the panel but there's nothing in the bottom so when you remove the thumb screws it simply falls out now the interior layout follows a dual chamber design so we have our micro ATX motherboard that is flat with five PCI slots which is awesome there's this giant cutout in front of the fan so you have five inches of clearance from the frame after the motherboard but of course it will be shorter because you have to still route your 24 pin cable but it gives you a little bit of flexibility for extra thick radiators for the bottom chamber we have a standard ATX power supply mount and a drive cage with three drive caddies and three SSD caddies on the side of the motherboard and these caddies have a little bit of flexibility on where you want to mount them so you can slightly reposition them if you need extra space for cables or something like that so that's nice now the bottom panel needs to be removed in order to install your power supply and access your drives here we have our case feed and the power supply dust filter however we have this additional ventilation which is supposed to be for additional fans 120 molar fans if you want but it is not dust filtered which I find odd and it's things like that alongside with really short spacing on that ventilated glass side panel that made me think that maybe this was a rushed release or they had other plans that didn't fully come to fruition but regardless I wanted to approach this build from a visual perspective and just to see how easy or difficult it would be to do an simple airflow system with some good illuminated hardware and then how easy it would be to do cable management and something that is that exposed well the experience were satisfactory up to a point and I literally through all the visual arsenal that I could to make this thing beautiful so first I use thermal tics ring trio fans which are actually quite beautiful they have the sent to elimination the exterior illumination and they also have the rear illumination so for the exhaust fan for example that ring elation shines right through the frame which looks stunning I also appreciate the ambient spill of the frame itself so you're not particularly seeing harsh LEDs you know it's all evenly split and I also replaced the 200 mm were a fan of the front with an RGB fan and I placed that behind the frame to give me a little bit more spacing between the fan and the front panel obviously I had to put in some RGB memory to color match to the theme of my light blue build so I have the team group Excalibur fantastic dims with a nice ambient illumination and that can easily color match to that or add some accent color with the other colors and purple looks fantastic and lastly to tidy up some cables I use the sleeved cable mod extensions which look awesome and I also use their sleeping for all-in-one coolers but I use this for cables because cable management in this case is a bit challenging so first we have all the cables from the top front IO that have to be bunched up and router to the side of the motherboard which is completely exposed and I don't know a way to route those cables so doesn't look messy and luckily I have this leaving so they're at least kind of like bunched up into one but I don't know how else you would control that so it looks actually just fine from that side maybe a low-profile USB 3 connector would have been nice because man nothing is completely blocking the graphics card and on the other side I used one of the SSD caddies beside the motherboard to hold the cables and the other SSD to basically just hide the entire mess that is the bottom chamber and that is because there is not a single not a single cable type point in that entire bottom chamber so I stashed all the cables into the hard drive cage so that it doesn't completely pop out and that is an issue when there is nothing to aid you with a completely exposed enclosure that's fully made of glass on all sides how are you supposed to do a clean system you have to put in hours and hours of work for cables to route them particularly way and then use like DIY solutions to hold those cables in place that is not a pleasant experience and the only solution here are covers for the bottom chamber to contain all that mess tinted glass side panels would not work because all side panels aren't too changeable so like how would you have that so it's not well thought out and that's unfortunate now of course the front panel is an airflow barrier so not only is our GPU temperature hotter not by much but still our CPU throttled at 75 degrees Celsius to 3.3 gigahertz instead of staying at 3.5 so yeah so then who is this case for it's exactly for the target audience who are water cooling but also are willing to experiment and put in the time to do something extremely beautiful and clean cable management is a big issue and so you have to go in with some DIY methods and controlling all the cables that are exiting from the power supply and how they enter back with that motherboard area it's difficult especially because we have glass on all three sides so that entire area is exposed and you just have to put in your all so the whole thing can look okay I don't think that's a particularly bad direction but we've gotten so comfortable with you know regular power supply chambers that hide all the mess that Thermaltake needs to put a little bit more work into something like this so that we don't have to the new mark to coursers trades and k70 keyboards are fully loaded with custom illumination convenient media buttons USB pass-through extra set of key camps and ergonomic wrist rest for each keyboard so you can type core game comfortably with a variety of MX switches available so you can check out which keyboard suits you best in the description below alright guys so that is the level 20 VT let me know how you would approach building is something like this for water cooling you know how would you do keel management and it's micro TX as popular as I think it is becoming let's have this conversation I'm a Dmitri make sure to subscribe and check out this other relevant content and yeah I'll see you in next