• Welcome to TechPowerUp Forums, Guest! Please check out our forum guidelines for info related to our community.
  • The forums have been upgraded with support for dark mode. By default it will follow the setting on your system/browser. You may override it by scrolling to the end of the page and clicking the gears icon.

Aerocool Tor

Darksaber

Senior Editor & Case Reviewer
Staff member
Joined
Jul 8, 2005
Messages
3,109 (0.43/day)
Location
Victoria, BC, Canada
System Name Corsair 2000D Silent Gaming Rig
Processor Intel Core i5-14600K
Motherboard ASUS ROG Strix Z790-i Gaming Wifi
Cooling Corsair iCUE H150i Black
Memory Corsair 64 GB 6000 MHz DDR5
Video Card(s) Gainward GeForce RTX 4080 Phoenix GS
Storage TeamGroup 1TB NVMe SSD
Display(s) Gigabyte 32" M32U
Case Corsair 2000D
Power Supply Corsair 850 W SFX
Mouse Logitech MX
Keyboard Sharkoon PureWriter TKL
The Aerocool Tor aims to deliver a pretty cool feature set for the gaming enthusiast. With plenty of glass, as well as three RGB fans and a remote to control it all out of the box, we load the Tor up, turn it on, and light it up to figure out if it holds up or if Aerocool had to cut too many corners to offer it at such an attractive price.

Show full review
 
Last edited:
I wish case reviews included airflow testing, I once purchased a case with awful airflow that I thought would have good airflow based on the fan positioning.
 
The interior grills behind the front fans are redundant, restrictive, and should be trimmed out.
 
The interior grills behind the front fans are redundant, restrictive, and should be trimmed out.

I expect if they did this, the case would have some added flex to it and unfortunately rigidity would suffer.


However - I do agree - the un-needed metal should go so airflow can reign supreme. :p
 
Glass front smothering the two front fans is a stupid idea and needs wiped out from the face of this planet.
Also, can people writing articles use spell check or a dictionary, there is a difference between lose and loose.
 
Glass front smothering the two front fans is a stupid idea and needs wiped out from the face of this planet.
Also, can people writing articles use spell check or a dictionary, there is a difference between lose and loose.
Don't expect it to get any better, this is a Darksaber case review. Frankly at this point I treat them as poorly disguised advertisements rather than actual reviews.

The first red flag here is that there's no reference to what products on the market this competes with - It took me all of 20 seconds to discover that actually, there's this deepcool case on newegg for $4 more that seems to be far superior in terms of function - https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16811853066

The first big improvement is slats on both sides rather than just one. Twice the intake is a pretty obvious step toward "better".

The second improvement is that the fans are recessed more deeply from the front panel. This means those slats are actually somewhat useful because their whole area can be used for effective intake. It's hard to judge from photos, but knowing that a USB type A connector is 4.5mm tall, and measuring on the image how many connectors would fit in the width of the front panel plastic, I come out with the front plastic section being about 30mm on the aerocool, from the start of the plastic, to the back of the glass. Given that we can see the fans are mounted directly to the metal front with no recessing, and given we know a fan is 25mm thick front to back, that gives us about 5mm of space in front of the fan for it to breath, maybe as much as 7mm if my estimates are off, and almost all of the intake for the case is *behind* that, forcing the airflow to not only struggle through this tiny gap to get to the fans, but also forcing it to make much sharper turns to get there - something that we know causes a massive loss of efficiency.

Basically, we can all but prove that this thing will struggle to keep components cool.

The third improvement is that it has 3 front RGB fans at $74, rather than two RGB fans and a rear black fan at $69.99, which is pretty obviously better value for money overall.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top