I wasn't particularly happy that it was black, I remember going with my friend Steve to Frys around April 2014 to go buy parts because I think I got my extra check for those 6 months because there's 52 weeks in a year instead of just 50, or I got my tax return. I had a few ideas about what I wanted in a computer and I think I ended up not doing any of them, like doing SLI with video cards. Because of this I got a motherboard that was roughly $100 from MSI, manufactured in 2011 so it was a little slower and still mostly had USB 2 and a few PCIe slots but had just as many original PCI slots. And when we got the case, I either didn't have much of a choice in colors for the Ostrog Enermax eca3253 case, or it was between a few other cases I didn't like. I ended up with black.
But I thought the case was kind of cool. It had the power button and USB ports on the top front of the case facing upwards rather than on the side where I envisioned having the computer face towards my hallway, walking through it and breaking off whatever was plugged into the USB ports. So it had to face upwards. I didn't really like the vent on the side of the case in the transparent plastic you can see all the components through.
I also didn't have much in the way of money to buy fans so my friend Steve gave me a few basic fans he had lying around, no RGB, and then I wanted to do RGB so I bought one fan and didn't think at all about what I wanted so the one I bought only glowed red. So for eight years afterwards, I would have far preferred white, blue or purple and never even imagined something that cycled through the colors. A black case with red LED fans did almost nothing for me. But since I got one red fan, Steve then later produced an extra red only LED fan. It wasn't his fault, I just didn't think about what I wanted because I didn't know what the options were. I just ran right into it, thinking at first that I couldn't go wrong, but I had a price limitation of like $15 or something and I think I wanted any color rather than no color and so on a whim I think I chose red because f the red trim of the case.
I had plenty of time to think about what I would have preferred if given the choice and if money was less of an issue. And when I saw my other IT friends case mounted on the wall, he told me that he had a client he had to build a server for on short notice and so he took apart his own computer so he could use the case. And when he was done later that day. he made a run to Frys to get a new case for his own computer, which in Vegas was on the opposite side of town across the street from the airport before it closed. While he was there, he saw the Thermaltake Core P3 on sale and decided to go for it. And he mounted it on the wall of his office which is a popular choice.
I went to his house one day while visiting Vegas for the first time in while and couldn't believe what I saw. There were lots of cool cases on the market and I was particularly into the open-frame design, but there weren't a lot of open-frame cases I liked because they would expand so much on the open-frame concept that some of them were kind of like open jaws, lying on their side, motherboard on one part of the jaw and the rest of the components on the other. That did nothing for me. I thought some of the In Win computer cases were really cool, but especially their H-Frame case, but they were all extremely expensive and I was delighted to discover that Thermaltake's Core P3 was just over $100 which seemed very reasonable for a computer case, especially one so fancy looking.
Shortly after Steve helped me build my Ostrog computer with the red LED fans, he then went and bought either the same case or a very similar one that was all white, and he bought all white LED fans to go with it and named it something like White Fox or whatever, and then asked me what I named mine and I was like, "Uh, is that a thing people do? Name their computers?"
"Sure, why not? You've never heard of that?"
"No" I said. And then I talked for a bit about what I would name it but I couldn't think of anything. I am not good an naming things. My names always come from something else I've heard. I named this blog after an idea I had from a movie line.
But ever since I saw his all white computer, for some reason I kind of wanted to do the same thing. But I was stuck for the next eight years with my first choice. And there were things to like about the Ostrog case. But it seemed a little limited in hard drive mounting space. It had a bunch of attachments for what appeared to be hard drives, but I couldn't figure out how to use them because the screw holes to secure the hard drives were in the wrong places, and they didn't seem to do what I needed for my build so I eventually took them out and then lost them.
So I got a white Thermaltake Core P3 a few months ago now. And I thought it would be a good idea to review the case now that I have it. I am very happy with it as it is right now. I was a little disappointed to find out the case is a bit dated because it has two USB 2.0 and two 3.0 ports on the front I/O panel, and the updated versions of the same case that's slightly different in design, which I don't like as much, has a more updated front I/O panel. But I use a USB hub connected directly to the motherboard anyway so this doesn't really matter. It just sort of dates the case.
I was very happy with how much easier it is to set up a computer, putting it all together and installing all the components like the motherboard and power supply and so on, and this case makes cable management way easier than my Ostrog case ever did. They both have dedicated areas of the case for cables, but the Thermaltake Core P3 actually has a useful amount of space especially for those much thicker PSU bundles of cords. The Ostrog had something like a quarter or a third of an inch of space between the motherboard tray and the rear case panel. Since everything I do takes me longer than it typically takes others, and it would have taken me like five hours to really cable-manage the Ostrog and I didn't have enough patience to do that so I never did a thorough job of it in all the years I was using it. But I did cable manage the Thermaltake and it took like a half hour to forty five minutes for me. So for you it will probably take less time especially if you know what you're doing, which I don't.
I do have a pretty big complaint about this Thermaltake case however. The feet that screw to the bottom of the case are plastic. This ordinarily wouldn't really matter that much unless you're into higher quality materials or something like that, but the problem I have with it is that the base of the case is lighter than the pane of glass that's mounted way off the side of the center of gravity of the case. The feet are adequately wide enough to account for this, but because these feet have to extend so far out from the bottom of the main frame of the case and they're made of plastic plastic with rubber on the bottom, and this is a very heavy case, the plastic appears to already be wearing under the load.
I've already accidentally put weight on the case multiple times while knowing the feet seemed inadequate the second I installed them, and when I put weight on it, I heard the quiet, high-pitch whine of the plastic as it rubs against the metal of the case that it's screwed to, kind of like when you drive over bumps or you're getting in and out of a car that's sat in the heat for decades and it has a lot of plastic throughout, there's a cacophony of squeaks. I am already trying to figure out what I'm going to replace the feet with. I have had the occasion to move the case without picking it up, just sliding it across the table its on, and this has caused that the feet have twisted a bit under the weight of the case. So yeah. That's not good. They shouldn't be twisting already. The plastic clearly wasn't much more than an afterthought, or they knew everyone would want to mount it so they only included feet as a formality or perhaps the casualty of keeping the case as relatively affordable as it is. Maybe they included feet just so there was something for the case to sit on while you worked on it.
After a while of thinking about this, I did finally have an idea. I don't want to mount it to a wall, but I have been thinking for years of buying a stand for my TV with a VESA mount, and thought I could buy two and put this computer tower on one of them. I hope it works when and if I do finally do it.
