The Urban S31 mid-tower is designed to offer a "simple and elegant aesthetic" and is intended for users who "look for everything but a flamboyant appearance."
The Thermaltake Urban S31 mid-tower chassis is built from SECC with a brushed aluminum finish, supports a maximum of ATX-sized motherboards, and will be offered both with and without a windowed side-panel. The latter option is advertised as offering better acoustic dampening for a quieter operation.
Thermaltake ships the chassis with two 120 mm 1,000 RPM cooling fans with dust filters that are rated to produce a maximum of 16 dBA, and the Urban S31 has support for an additional four 120 mm fans, grommets for water cooling and computability with CPU coolers of up to 155 mm in height.
Finally, the case has space for graphics cards of up to 410 mm in length, three 5.25" drive bays, six 3.5" / 2.5" drives and an additional 3.5" or 2.5" drive via the case's top-mounted "hot-swap" docking station. The front panel I/O further includes two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports and the standard HD audio connectors.
The Thermaltake Urban S31 is expected to retail with a recommended price of €95 ($124).
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Tarun Iyer was a contributor for Tom's Hardware who wrote news covering a wide range of technology topics, including processors, graphics cards, cooling systems, and computer peripherals. He also covered tech trends such as the development of adaptive all-in-one PCs.
I really like that top, built-in dock for extrernal drives. A nice feature to have without needing to worry about hooking up to a USB/eSATA port and using another power outlet.
If they're still going to support mechanical media they might as well go all the way and provide bays for tape drives. And maybe a record player while they're at it.
A Bad DayUm, aren't vertical-mounted hard drives are more susceptible to motor burnout?
The docks are mostly for data transfers and/or recovery. Not designed for long-term usage.
