Interior

Popping the side panel off (after breaking, fixing, breaking and then giving up on the side panel handle) reveals a pretty unique interior that's dominated by Thermaltake’s Advanced Thermal Chamber (ATC) system.

This is a system of clip in plastic plates that divides the thermal sources in your PC – the GPU, the CPU and the PSU, into separate thermal chambers, focussing airflow to where it needs to be and individually cooling these components. The setup is composed of four separate plastic panels fitted into the case and over your hardware, and while it might sound and even look like a great idea, in reality it’s substandard plastic rubbish which causes more problems than it solves, and which broke shortly after these photos were taken.

Our first issue was that the top most ATC plastic plate did not allow us to fit our passively cooled Radeon HD 3850 thanks to its enlarged cooler, but this wasn’t a problem for long because it’s retention clips broke on the third fitting – never mind.

The panel below it, designed to encase the graphics card/s in their own thermal compartment only succeeds in interfering with the crucial airflow from the side mounted 230mm fan and the lower most panels are made mostly redundant by the use of a pre-cut blowhole in the base of the case for 120mm fan equipped PSUs.


The real concern here though is that modern components – graphics cards especially, are designed to be cooled in a normal case environment, not in a special plastic tunnel. Anyone who’s used a Radeon HD 4850, 4870 or 4870X2 extensively will know just how hot the rear plate of the card can get (here’s a hint – you can fry an egg on them!) and it just can’t be a good idea to put such a hot component into a confined space encased in plastic, despite the airflow from the front mounted 140mm fan.

Luckily though the ATC system is easy enough to remove, and the rest of the Spedo’s interior is much more pleasing, with gorgeously finished painted steel construction that in contrast to the plastic mess that adorns the Spedo, really is very solid.

The interior is also very spacious, lessening the blow from the lack of a removable motherboard tray, and fitting hardware into the Spedo was very easy, with plenty of clearance on all sides and the high-rise dimensions of the case making room for even the largest of CPU coolers.


The stock cooling solution is also very good, with the front 140mm and side 230mm fans operating as intakes and two rear 120mm and top 230mm fans acting as exhausts, with extra 120mm fan mounts in the base and behind the CPU socket. There’s even a handy positional 120mm fan mount built into the 5.25” drive bay assembly, allowing you to specifically direct airflow wherever you need it the most. Thermaltake was kind enough to include a spare 120mm cooling fan so you can take advantage of one of these three extra fan mounts straight out of the box.

Frustratingly though every fan in the Spedo terminates in a 4-pin Molex connection rather the preferable 3-pin fan connection we’d prefer. This means that not only is there no in-built option to adjust the fan speed, but finding a third party fanbus that takes Molex rather than 3-pin is going to be difficult.