Thermaltake Kandalf LCS VD4000 review

De Kandalf LCS VD4000SWA

The first thing that hits you when you unpack the Kandalf LCS is its size, it is truly huge and measures 54 x 22 x 64 centimeters. The case has room for nine 5,25 inch drives, three hardisks and one external 3,25 inch drive. However the bottom slot can not be used, as the hoses for the radiator run through here, and when you utilize the hard drive cage this takes another three slots away. effectively you have four or five 5,25 inch slots, which should still be more than enough. The case comes supplied with six fans, three 12cm on the radiator, one 12cm at the back as exhoust, one 92mm in front of the harddrives and one 92mm that can be attached to the top as an exhaust fan. Two of the 12cm fans are clear ones with blue leds, the one at the back and the middle fan on the radiator.

Loads of space!

Thee radiator is placed outsode the case in the door at the front, a very good place as there will always be fresh air running thorugh it so cooling performance is better, however it does mean you have to open the door to get to your DVD and floppy drives. The door is held in place by little magnets, which are not very strong. Opening and closing the door a lot of times might cause these to stop working eventually.

At the top of the case we find a little futuristic lid, that hides two USB ports, one FireWire port and audio connections. However when using a full sized ATX motherboard that normally has these connections at the bottom of the board the cables for these ports will only just reach. This means that these will run through the middle of the case and can not be hidden, not a major issue, but we feel these cables should have been around 20cm longer.

The Kandalf has a system where the PCI and PCI-Express cards can be held in place without screws but with little plastic clips. A nice feature, but when using on large graphics card, like the ATI X19xx series or the GeForce 79xx or 88xx series these clips are not strong enough, let alone when you put a heavy copper waterblock on the card. A case like this does mostly mean that the user will water cool their graphics card, which renders this feature a bit useless. Luckily there is the possibility ti use the good old scres as well, but this does involve removing the plastic clips and placing it back afterwards. The 5,25 drives can be attached without screws and are held in place by plastic clips, however the hard drives and floppy drive will still have to be attached with screws.

USB, firewire and audio at the top of the case

The on/off switch and reset button and LEDs are placed on a 5,25 inch rail, and can be moved freely into one of the 9 bays. The only 3,25 inch external bay is on this rail as well, and strangly enough the cables on these are of ample length, so this can be placed in th top bay and you wull still have plenty cable left to hide these somewhere in the case.