Thermaltake S500 Steel TG Case Review

Peter Donnell / 5 years ago

Complete System

There are a lot of possible configurations possible with the Thermaltake S500 Steel TG. For air cooling, you could install massive 200mm fans for huge airflow at low RPM; which may be perfect for those who want a quiet office workhorse. For enthusiast gamers, it’s likely you’ll be looking at liquid cooling though. Sure, it’ll support custom-loop hardware and plenty of it. However, something like a 360mm AIO from Thermaltake will be more than enough for most consumer demands. Mounted in the top, you can keep that front panel clear for bringing in cool air to cool your GPU and other hardware too. Albeit, you could mount the radiator on the front panel if you so desired.

Cable Management

It’s not hard to get a clean build with so much space on the interior. Some wider motherboards do tend to cover the grommets to the right of the motherboard though, which is a shame. However, the space provided for the right panel radiator mount quickly doubles up for that purpose too. Plus, with a vertical pass-through on that mini PSU shroud means that GPU cables can be routed cleanly to the graphics card, rather than from behind the motherboard.

Performance

As I said, the case only comes with 120mm fans as standard. However, for a premium case like this, it’s likely you’ll want to be flexible with how you customise the design. For this build, you can see 2 x 200mm fans in the front. What’s neat is that they sit in front of the case, but behind the front panel; so they don’t eat up interior space. You can see the same with the top radiator, which is sitting under the top panel but above the case; the fans are inside the case though, but this still frees up a lot of space.

Big graphics cards and a huge PSU? That’s really not going to be an issue here. The length of the chassis means you could have the biggest GPU on the market, and still have a fan-radiator-fan combo in the front panel with room to spare. Again, it’s a pretty big mid-tower.

Mounting the GPU on its side looks superb though, and as you can see, the expansion slots turned 90-degree means you have the full bank of PCIe slots available; with enough riser cables.

Tempered Glass

While the case is basically all matte black, with a slightly tinted window, it doesn’t have to be hidden away. Because it’s all black, when you do throw colour in there, it provides a really strong contrast to show off your hardware. That being said, I’m sure it’d be pretty sweet to have it with a solid steel panel on both sides for a quick stealthy build.