Product Listing

Titan Robela TWC-A88 Water-Cooled Casing

By Zachary Chan - 9 Apr 2006

Exterior Design Part 2

Exterior Design Part 2

You have to open the front door to access your drive bays, of which there are five 5.25-inch bays that you usually find in a mid-tower. There are also two external facing 3.5-inch drives, which is quite accommodating since most casings now feature only one. The drawback to this is that the hard drive cage is slightly smaller than some other casings and holds only up to three drives. Of course, you can still install hard drives even at the external facing drive bay if you require more than three of them.

Opening the door is easy, as long as you remember that it is locked by default. The key is latched to the back when you first obtain the case.

The internals of the front bezel is also accessible by opening yet another layer behind the door. Again, this is simple and makes installation of devices a breeze.

The 80mm fan at the front is optional.

The standard LED indicators for power and hard drive activity are missing and this could be quite irritating if you need to troubleshoot your system. Straining your ears to find out whether your hard drive has hung up on you is not anyone's idea of fun. You can easily open the drive bay layer to reveal yet another layer - the steel skeleton behind the plastic. Here we can also find air filters for an optional 80mm fan at the lower half of the casing.

The right side panel is where the radiator and pipes for the water-cooling are located. Therefore, expect to find a fair bit of weight on handling this side of the side panel. Much of the panel consists of the radiator grill and vents, though at the top, you will find the refilling port. This port is appropriately located on the outside and while it shouldn't be a common occurrence, users should probably need to top up the reservoir of water occasionally. The water-cooling work is actually done by the radiator mounted to the panel, so detaching it from the rest of the system mid-way would probably be very bad news, as the water tubes, power cables for the cooler fans are all connected to the panel. This explains why Titan has secured the panel to the casing with steel chains.

The right side panel and its gleaming radiator grill.

Water is added to the cooling unit through this port here at the side of the panel. It's a convenient location too.

Two 120mm fans provide all the cooling for the radiator on the side panel, as going for water-cooling doesn't necessarily mean that the Titan can do without any cooling fans. The advantage though is that those fans would probably not need to spin as fast as your typical CPU/GPU coolers. The 120mm ones in the Robela are rated at 1000 � 1800RPM but the normal usage would be around 1000RPM, making them relatively silent. However, the total of three pre-installed fans altogether, with the option of two more, makes us wonder if the noise level would end up equal to a normal air-cooled casing with all five fans in action.

Here is where the water-cooling work is done. The radiator is cooled by two 120mm fans spinning at around 1000RPM.

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