Joined on 02/26/20
Truly excellent airflow with premium build quality
Pros: - Looks good. - Excellent build quality. Feels very premium, and most panels can be removed without tools. - Excellent airflow, which I'll expand on: The airflow is truly excellent with the huge front intake fans. I run an air cooled setup with an NH-D15 on a 5800x3D. It's a tall cooler, and sometimes you can't put two fans on it because the memory is too tall. This case fits it easily, though! You should absolutely setup an aggressive custom fan curve to take advantage of the cooling! The out of the box fan curve for most motherboards won't let you notice how good the cooling is. But with an aggressive fan curve, even hot CPUs will run extremely quietly. The 5800x3D is a hot CPU. I have the CPU fans plugged into the main CPU header, and two bottom intake fans plus the main front-panel fans plugged into the included fan hub, which is plugged into one of the chassis fan ports. This lets me have two different groups of fans to control individually. (I use the free software "Fan Control" for the curves.) Firstly, I can have all fans run at 20% under 60C. This handles idle workloads and browsing around, and is literally silent. **I cannot hear it** -- I can't even notice a difference after turning the PC off. And this is with 6 fans running. I then have fans around 40% from 60C to 75C. This handles most gaming workloads, since the CPU isn't fully-utilized in gaming. But during gaming, the GPU fans are much louder than the chassis fans. I'll have to check with a new GPU, hopefully soon! The chassis and CPU fans aren't quite as silent as 20%, but barely audible. The GPU fans really make it impossible to tell that the case fans have ramped up. Though, if you REALLY stress the system (like with Cinebench), the fans are of course loud. The CPU really takes advantage of as much cooling as it can get once you're around 80C, and none of the fans are quiet getting close to 100%. Though, when the GPU is maxed during games, running the chassis fans at 100% doesn't really make a noticeable difference in its cooling or performance. So at the end of the day, I almost never NEED the fans to be at 100%, because I'm never taxing the CPU enough to need it. So for gaming workloads, you can run all the fans at 40% and they're virtually silent! This was not possible in my previous case, the P300A, which was also airflow oriented. The big front fans on this make a big difference. But you do need to set up a custom fan curve to take advantage of this, because motherboards aren't that smart about fan speed.
Cons: The only true con is cable management, but it wasn't too bad. I successfully managed everything without pressing against the glass on the back, even with the thick basic PSU cables from Corsair. - There aren't enough holes at the top and bottom to let cables through. - The back could be just a bit deeper. You probably won't just be able to toss all the cables back there and call it a day without organizing at least a bit. I would have already spent a while managing it back there, so it's not really a pain point for me.
Overall Review: If you need a lot of space for peripherals, drives, rads, water cooling, this is probably not for you. The torrent compact is just not built for that use case. But I highly recommend this case for my use case, which is air-cooled gaming. The airflow is excellent, and the big front fans allow you to run all fans under 50%, even under gaming workflows. And even under 20% for browsing around. So it's a very quiet case once you set up a fan curve to take advantage of the airflow -- assuming your GPU isn't loud, which the case obviously can't help with! It also looks great, IMO, and the fan RGB looks great through the front case. Plus, the build quality is excellent and everything feels very premium. Two other notes: the fan/case 3-pin ARGB is not compatible with 4-pin RGB headers. And the USB-C front-panel connector (USB 3.1 Gen 2) is also not common on older motherboards. For example, my ROG B450-F doesn't have 3-pin ARGB or usb 3.1gen2. Both are obviously optional features, but depend on motherboard support. (Alternatively, adapters exist.)
Gets the job done.
Overall Review: I have no complaints. The price was okay (even though it felt expensive), and the design is decent. I can't hear the fan (I don't think!), and all my components get the power they need. The modularity is always a plus, and I feel like this will last me a long time.