Cooling & accessories
One notable selling point of the DX is its front-mounted 140mm fan.
This is finished in traditional Thermaltake colours and is – as claimed – surprisingly quiet, in part because of its large size and an increased fin-count.
Power comes via a single Molex connector but it would have been nice to see a three-pin header-adapter to allow speed to be control by the motherboard.
As with the rear expansion ports, the external 3.5in and 5.25in bays up front offer a tool-free fitting solution, though the highest of the bays is rather compromised by the top-mounted external ports.
The fact that the cradle can be removed makes the build easier – drives can be installed into the cradle on the lab bench and that's a bonus.
In addition, being able to permanently remove the cradle is, apparently, a further selling-point. That's because, it's only with the cradle removed that there's sufficient space for a longer-than-normal graphics cards - such as the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX and AMD Radeon HD 2900 XT, for example.
If you intend to use two, three or more internal hard disks, though, the downside of removing the cradle permanently is that it might be necessary to use adaptor plates to install some of them in the 5.25in bays – and they'd be completely away from the cooling effect of the case's front fan.
