SilverStone Temjin TJ08-E: Fat Case in a Little Coat
by Dustin Sklavos on August 4, 2011 1:50 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
- Mini ITX
- SilverStone
- MicroATX
- Mini-Tower
In and Around the SilverStone Temjin TJ08-E
Superficially the SilverStone Temjin TJ08-E looks like a simple, clean brushed aluminum mini tower with design cues that wouldn't seem out of place on a Lian Li enclosure. There's a single large vent on the front for the intake fan, two USB 3.0 ports, the standard mic and headphone jacks, and two 5.25" external drive bays. At the bottom is even a 3.5" external bay, although the placement seems a little awkward and the cover rotates a bit in the bay. Still, if you're not interested in putting a floppy drive or card reader in, internally that bay will support an additional 3.5" drive. When you get to the top of the case you'll see the typical top vent, but that vent really is anything but typical.
Your first clue that everything in the TJ08-E is a little topsy turvy is going to be when you look at the back and realize that everything has been flipped: the motherboard mounts to the opposite side of the enclosure, and the power supply bay is at the top and designed to mount the PSU upside-down. There's a major benefit to all this, though: the motherboard is now lined up behind the front 180mm intake fan.
Opening the enclosure is a three part process. Both side panels are secured with thumbscrews and you'll want to remove them. The top panel of the TJ08-E also comes off, and this is something I really wish SilverStone had simplified: you have to remove six screws to take it off, and when you're installing hardware you will need to have it removed.
Once you're inside you'll be met with a fairly generous amount of space behind the removable motherboard tray; that removable tray is a nice enough touch and SilverStone recommends you remove it during installation, but during assembly I actually found that step was unnecessary. There's a decent-sized backplate cutout in the motherboard tray and a few holes surrounding it for routing cables.
There are also two drive cages stacked on top of each other; the top one is intended to support four 3.5" drives and is lined with a soft material to dampen vibration. I'd prefer if the drive cage were rotated with the drive ports facing the back to simplify cable routing, but space is really at a premium inside the TJ08-E with everything SilverStone packed in here. Below the top cage is a second cage that can be used to house an external 3.5" drive or an internal one, and then below that are four holes in the bottom of the enclosure used to mount a 2.5" SSD.
SilverStone also includes two features of potentially questionable value, though I think they're really ideal more for shipping than anything else, and they certainly don't hurt. There's an adjustable support on the bottom of the enclosure for larger coolers to reduce stress on the motherboard (the standoffs of which are built into the motherboard tray, thankfully), and then the top of the drive cages is raised and flat in such a way that it can support longer graphics cards to reduce stress. SilverStone includes a rubber pad that can be affixed to the cage to close the gap, too, preventing vibration in the process.
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superccs - Thursday, August 4, 2011 - link
mATX is a vastly more popular board size, one that I have been using for years.One thing I like to see is well thought out airflow, something that is very rare in most case designs.
JarredWalton - Thursday, August 4, 2011 - link
We decided on two test beds for our case reviews; for ATX-compatible and larger, we use a Sandy Bridge ATX motherboard and test with overclocking. For micro-ATX and ITX, we use a mini-ITX motherboard and, where possible, test with the GTX 580 installed. We figured two set configurations was better than three or four different options. The only thing mATX would potentially add is more performance and more heat, so by that token testing ITX in a uATX case is actually putting less strain on the cooling.JasonInofuentes - Thursday, August 4, 2011 - link
http://youtu.be/IolqkwNSmfAbobbozzo - Thursday, August 4, 2011 - link
FAKE youtube link above!GeorgeH - Thursday, August 4, 2011 - link
Using modular PSUs in small cases like this is often a bad idea and far from required. The problem with modular PSUs is that the modular bits tend to add significant length and stiffness that makes cable routing harder (often significantly.) Non-modular supplies might have an extra SATA cable or two to tuck away, but that's generally easy to do. Problems can come up with PSUs that are much too powerful and therefore come with tons of extra cables, but that's just operator error. :)Knifeshade - Thursday, August 4, 2011 - link
Wouldn't it be fairer to use stock coolers rather than custom CPU coolers? The CPU temp is rather impressive, at just 6-30 degrees Celsius above room temperature. But I can't help but think most of the kudos goes to the custom cooler rather than the cooling prowess of the case.Hrel - Thursday, August 4, 2011 - link
I like this case a lot, but how would one go about improving the acoustics? I mean, I could go out and buy sound dampening foam and put it in... but that stuff is really over-priced everywhere I've looked and that seems like kind of a pain.Dustin Sklavos - Friday, August 5, 2011 - link
The Zalman cooler we use for testing is honestly a bit loud and the Zotac board doesn't really have much in the way of fan control; just putting a quieter cooler (think the Cooler Master Hyper 212+) in would go a LONG way towards quieting down the Temjin.bobbozzo - Thursday, August 4, 2011 - link
This isn't the first article with this problem, but the white on yellow text in the graphs is near impossible to read on both my Dell LCD and my Samsung 2343BW.Also, you mention that the Antec Mini is bigger, but I would have liked to see more details & comparison.
Thanks!
MadMan007 - Friday, August 5, 2011 - link
This thing is begging to be used with a PICO-style PSU and just integrated graphics for those who don't need a discrete GPU.Or for those that do and aren't going to go with a high-end card and madly overclocked CPU, an SFX12V PSU like, oh, I don't know...Silverstone's very own ST45SF.