Building With The Element V
The Element V’s installation kit is far more basic than many of its competitors, since most of the case’s adapters and fans are pre-installed. Thermaltake adds a 3.5” external bay adapter and cover panel, a PC speaker, and two plastic grommets for use in place of the knock-outs with external liquid-cooling hoses.
The Element V is cavernous, swallowing up full-sized PC components with ease. Because standard-screw mounts are used throughout the case, the only other noticeable exception from normal PC builds is that the front-panel cables are too long. Specifically, running the front-panel cables around the bottom of the motherboard to its farthest corner still results in eight inches of slack that need to be tucked away behind the tray or drive cages. However, we’ll try not to criticize that feature too much, as it's better to have too much cable than not enough.
Lighting modes for the three LED-equipped fans include blue, green, and red as well as two alternating-color patterns. A sixth LED mode disables lighting entirely.
One more thing we should mention is that the side-fan contacts on our particular sample were slightly misaligned, so that we had to bump the bottom corner of the side panel rather hard to turn the fan on. Moving the case caused the panel to shift, and we had to bump the panel once again for the fan to work. This is especially troublesome, since the connectors are not adjustable.
