Thermaltake Mozart TX

“Just imagine what you could do with all this space!”

Instead of a tricky clown-car case design which crams all your components into a tiny space like illegal immigrants into a shipping container, the Mozart simply takes the Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey and stretches it so it’s as deep as it is wide. The end result is that your gear gets all the lebensraum it could hope for, and then some. It comes up to halfway between your knee and your hip; and towers menacingly over small children.

The strange thing is that it’s surprisingly shallow, because the drive bays are mounted above the motherboard instead of in front of it. Thanks to its width, you don’t have to sacrifice a series of 5.25” bays to add your hard drives, unlike other cases we’ve seen. The other benefit is that the case is split into three sections; the motherboard is where you’d expect it to be, but a second ITX motherboard mounting bay is sectioned off and positioned directly opposite the main chamber -- and the drives reside their own area at the top of the case.

Thanks to the width, you don’t lose any 5.25” bays when you install 3.5” hard drives, unlike some other cases we’ve seen. At the very top of the case, and above the five 5.25” bays, there’s a wider bay that can house Thermaltake’s optional Pimp My Ride-style 7” fold out LCD monitor. To the left of this is a see through panel, behind which you can mount a VFD.

As the main power supply is housed in the ITX section behind the motherboard, the cables have to snake through the case, where they run the risk of being stripped on some edges of the case. The front panel may be aluminium, but the insides are pressed steel, and even though most of the edges are rolled, a few are just waiting to slice through cable, finger and all. This ceases to be a problem if you use cable extenders, but none are included with the case. Which is a problem.

Since there’s so much distance between the motherboard and the drive bays, the SATA and IDE cable lengths we’re all used to literally won’t go the distance from the motherboard to the drives. You’ll need to buy your own longer cables because none are included with the case. You can connect drives with standard length cables, but only if they’re in the lowest bay in the case and if your motherboard headers are high enough. Doing this takes away the fun of being able to drop a disk into a drive that sits mere centimetres below your desk though.

Ten 120mm fan mounts litter the case, and five of them are fitted with Thermaltake 12 volt, 0.33 amp brushless fans. Individually they’re quiet, but add them together and you’ll consciously notice their drone. One of them is strapped to the removable hard drive bay, one blows over the middle of the motherboard from the front of the case, two exhaust fans sit behind the drives and another exhaust fan is mounted behind the CPU. There’s also a blowhole with a mesh cover in the bottom Perspex window for your power supply.

The Mozart doesn’t have the interior (or exterior) elegance of some other swankier cases on the market, however it’s not without its charm. There are grommets in place for five out of the seven hard drive bays in the removable caddy. The sliding lock system on the 5.25” bays and over the PCI slots do work, and accommodate dual slot graphics cards, but screws still work better.

The construction may not be the best, but you can sit on the case without worrying about it buckling. The slide out feet should really have been ditched in favour of wheels, thanks to its server styling. Despite the fact that it’s certainly not a case for everyone, it’s a modder’s delight. If you filled the case with everything, you’d still have space left over for a second Mini-ITX system, water cooling rig and a bar fridge.