VR Features
Silverstone TJ-10 ESA - Green Beam Glory
The Bling
Written by floppy and filed under Reviews > Cooling & Chassis
Published on March 13, 2008, 11:59 am
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Case in full bling. instead of the boring all black fans that came with the TJ10, Silverstone has chosen to install 5x super-silent 120mm fans with green leds in the case to suit Nvidia's theme green. Cables for the fans are also nicely managed by default with cable holders installed. Great work by Silverstone there, which spares the enthusiast some trouble managing cables. The fans are silent and are pretty weak, pushing a bit less air than what i expected.
3/4 view
With Side Panel on.
Essentially, the TJ10 ESA is Silverstone's collaboration with almighty Nvidia in regards to achieving ESA certification, and apart from the ESA control board and replacing the fans with green leds, there's essentially no innovation at all. 0.5a per channel for fan power is definitely measly, as we can see, many gamers will like to switch their fans to highway mode during gaming, where noise isn't too much of a concern with either their headphones on or 5.1 speakers blasting and stability is a major concern. Most of the rheobus/ multi fan control panels available in the market now supports up to 1.5a of power per channel.
The price difference between the TJ10 and the ESA version currently stands at a whopping 60 bucks USD. The convenience of being able to control all your thermal and bling devices via a simple software control panel is definitely appealing to many end-users, but sadly this piece of innovation isn't gonna move enthusiast much as whatever that can be done via ESA can also be done via a simple rheobus device(which probably costs less and looks just as nice on your 5.25" bays, too). We've seen mixed feelings about ESA across the web, with critics slamming the technology as gimmicky, and the supporters citing ESA as an novelty and innovative. We were unable to get ESA to function in full swing due to the lack of ESA components in our labs.
Nevertheless, the Silverstone TJ10 case is still a fantastic case designed by the enthusiast for the enthusiast, and to run it down because of an unworthy component within is definitely shameful. The TJ10 is definitely one of the best case to hold your Tri-SLI gaming monster, and will still be in the many months to come.
