Conclusion
Overall, then, how did the Armor LCS do?Well, I think it's fair to say could have been better, could have been worse. The problem doesn’t come from the chassis or the case, but a combination of the two. They just struggle to work well together, showing up each others flaws in difference ways, and the water-cooling does well, at the expense of the case, and vice-versa.
There’s a number of reasons why the chassis should be very good at what it does, and indeed, if tested on its own it might well do better (we will put the case into a group review in the near future). Fact is though, with this water-cooling kit fitted, the inside airflow of the Armor LCS shows signs of weakness.
As for the water-cooling kit, it performed well but there are still a couple of issues we had with it.
We did find the floor of the chassis vibrated slightly, mainly due to the pump being directly connected with no noise absorption material inbetween.
Secondly, the mountings for the CPU, whilst very easy, are very much a one-use solution. We would like to see extra sticky pads included in the kit to cover hardware changes during the life of the kit.
Overall, then, the package could be better, on the other hand there are some good points in there when looked at separately, none more-so than the excellent performance from the water-cooling (with respect to the PSU) and the ability of the chassis to devour 9 terabytes of storage.
Let’s just hope Thermaltake takes on board our comments and we see improvements in its all-in-one chassis solutions in the future.
HEXUS.certification
