CASE STUDY

OUR $999 BUILD is complete, and what a journey it’s been. The Thermaltake Level 20 VT was not the chassis we wanted to use—it’s interesting, don’t get us wrong, but it’s not what we’d call a conventional case to work in. Alas, print deadlines stop for no man, and we had little choice but to forsake our delayed Fractal case and instead opt for the glass confines of this giant cube.

Was it a challenge? Yes and no. Less challenging, more confusing. Once all the glass panes were removed, the first issue was the roof bars in the top. These aren’t screwed down; rather, there’s a thin slice of metal securing each bar in place that you have to bend up to get the bar out. Then there was the power supply installation. There’s no obvious or easy way to install a PSU into this chassis. You can’t do it sideways, you can’t do it from the rear. As mentioned, we had to unsecure the base, lift up the remainder of the chassis, then drop the PSU into place, before carefully repositioning the chassis back down, and securing it and the power supply. It’s a clumsy solution, but it works.

Then there’s the SSD caddies. What a nightmare. Only one set of mounting screw locations, which forces your label the other way around, and no way to make the connectors face the bottom. We’d also have liked to see an easier way of mounting those traditional 3.5inch hard drives, preferably from the rear, in a more hot-swappable manner. The notion of hot-swap hard drives may be pushing up daisies right now, but reaching around inside to pull the sleds out feels unintuitive.

Other than those pesky case chassis conundrums, though, the overall spec of this rig—16GB of RAM, an RX 590, a fairly sizable HDD, and a six-core, 12-thread processor—is incredibly sound and gives it some serious grunt for any task you throw its way.

That 16GB of DDR4 @ 3,200, paired with our Ryzen 5 2600, makes it a true pro at any and all multithreaded tasks you throw its way, and as more games are leaning toward a “more threads the better” standpoint, it won’t let you down in the future there, either. The RX 590 is also an incredibly cost-effective card for 1080p. Yeah, we weren’t happy with it at launch, but that doesn’t stop it from being a solid card at this resolution, beating even the GTX 1060 when it comes to value per dollar.

The weakness of this rig lies with the SSD, however. Unfortunately, Adata’s QLC-based SU630 is incredibly underwhelming. From the lackluster cache to the poor long-term sequential performance, coupled with some serious doubts about endurance, it simply doesn’t make sense as a drive. The fact that you can now pick up a 500GB Samsung 860 Evo for only a bit more cash means that there’s just not enough to convince us of QLC’s value right now.

A top-down look this time1 around, but you can see why this style of design often leads to a mess when it comes to interior cable management. It’s difficult to route things when the mobo is flat. We’ve gone with AMD’s2 Wraith Spire on our build, because we wanted to add a little pizzazz to the affair. We’ve removed the radiator3 brackets at the top of the chassis to help us maintain a clean top-down aesthetic. A good upgrade for this4 would be to drop in a 250GB Samsung 960 Evo M.2 drive here, for some OS grunt.