Thermaltake Urban T81 Full Tower Case Review

The Urban T81 is a little more slender comparitively, only coming in at 9.3 inches in depth.  This unfortunately does cut down on headroom, but since there's no side case fans, the height limit for CPU heat sinks is still about 180mm (7in.) so it should be able to fit a large variety of crazy aftermarket tower sinks, or offer plenty of clearance for water pipes.

Horizontally, the maximum length for any discreet card is 400mm (15.75in.) with the drive cages installed.  Longer cards may be able to fit with the cages removed, but you'd have to get creative in moving it between the struts where the doors latch in order to install the card.   

To give an indication of size we dropped in a Gigabyte Z87X OC and topped it with a Thermaltake Frio Extreme.  In terms of overall size this motherboard fits quite nicely with plenty of space for cable routing and expansion cards.  Wider motherboards like the Rampage IV Extreme will fit but may feel a little cramped when it comes to routing SATA cables.

We did run across a few difficulties worth noting along the way.  During the install, we had trouble fitting a 360mm radiator internally into the front with the external drive bays still in place, and would have had to sacrifice the lower bay along with all of the internal cages to make it fit.  Running a smaller 240mm radiator should allow you to keep the external bays, or a 120mm to keep the lower two-tray cage in place along with the external bays.  For maximum cooling, sacrificing all of the internal and external bays, a 420mm radiator can be fitted internally.

Another thing we noticed when all of the componants were removed from the chassis, is some of the drive cages seemed to be a little bit crooked.  However, once the cages were re-installed I took a bubble level to the cages, and everything seemed to have straightened out just fine.