The opinionated ramblings and muses of a weary web victim.

Some people might recall 'back in the day' ...about 10 years ago .... Thermaltake joined forces with BMW Design and came out with the "Thermaltake Level 10" Limited Edition case.

It weighed a ton and was a silly price considering it didn't even come with a PSU ... $1299  AUD.

I ended up with No.221 of the world-wide 500.

Today, I saw on Ebay another for sale second hand [obviously] for $800 AUD - just "up the road" in South Australia .... No.21.

....and it comes with a MoBo and CPU.

Anyone who has had one knows how well they work being made from aluminium plate [not sheet] so are their own heat-sink and the sectioned compartments prevent heat transference as well.

A side effect of their huge weight and size..... no-one's likely to ever pinch it ....

My first one....No.221 ....


Comments
on Jan 09, 2025

I remember when you got the first one. You were fairly proud of it. 

on Jan 09, 2025

I think it was the subject of a "Happy Birthday, Jafo" post. Could be wrong, though.

edit: Wasn't his birthday...he was uninstalling W10.

on Jan 10, 2025

I actually have Windows 10 in that box...but only as a VM...

This was "back in the day" when M.2 'drives' were available, but the Win 7 OS couldn't be installed on one - however there was "a way" to do it...so I did.

These boxes are inherently so cool and 'solid' the fans are almost never on...and if the are you don't ever hear them anyway.  Even the PSU fan totally shuts down after boot, never to be heard from again.

You can see the section/thickness of the material used in that photo.

The little plate at the bottom of the MoBo 'box' is the offset for venting as well as clearance for the GPU.  I had to reinvent that with spacers so it's now out about twice as far [12mm] to clear the RTX3070 which isn't small.

One thing I have been improving is all six physical drives in the 'rack' are now SSDs ... a wee bit lighter...and cooler as well.  It's not really an extravagance to replace the drives...those old platters have quite a few uptime hours on them.... by 'few' I mean 3546.8 days [not hours]... and the M.2 drive claims it wants to retire in 2.5 years time ... 

on Jan 10, 2025


You can see the section/thickness of the material used in that photo.

Hence the jackhammer.