Page 3 - Physical Look - Inside
Consistent with its exterior, the interior of the SilverStone Temjin TJ04-E is also well finished. Everything as painted black, so you will be left with no hint of any bare metal showing. As you can see in our photo above, the layout is quite standard as far as a mid-tower with a bottom mounted power supply is concerned. What we have here is a distinct but fixed motherboard tray in the standard location, eight 3.5" hard drive bays in one removable rack to the right plus one extra bay not on the rack, and four externally accessible 5.25" drive bays on top. A separate 2.5" drive rack can be found between the main HDD rack and the power supply bay. According to SilverStone, the longest video card you can fit in the TJ04-E -- as limited by an adjacent hard drive -- is 12.8". This should be more than sufficient for 99% of those out there, but if you still need more room for some reason, you can get up to 17" clearance with no adjacent hard drive installed. The rack does not need to be removed. No video card is that long, but you get the idea.
The SilverStone Temjin TJ04-E is able to accommodate mITX, mATX, ATX, and SSI-CEB motherboards. The riser mounting holes are labeled for your convenience, with a legend engraved onto the motherboard tray. Six risers are pre-installed for you out of the box. One 120mm rear exhaust fan and one 120mm top intake fan are situated around the CPU socket area for maximum cooling performance. Both stock fans feature a 3-pin header. As shown in our photo above, we can spot an opening on the motherboard tray for easy aftermarket heatsink backplate installation without removing the motherboard itself from the chassis. The rather large opening is implemented to accommodate different motherboards, so you can be sure that, unless you own some really weird components, you should have absolutely no issues taking advantage of this feature.
Because the SilverStone Temjin TJ04-E features a bottom mounted power supply bay, the chassis platform is raised about two centimeters off the ground to accommodate units with fans at the bottom. Inside the chassis, two beveled rails on the bottom panels elevate the power supply up a further half centimeter, just to ensure enough air is made available to your PSU. The ventilation grille has an externally removable dust filter pre-installed as mentioned on the previous page, so you won't need to worry about stuff clogging your fans down the road. Around the power supply bay are convenient openings for you to route cables behind the motherboard tray, which is awesome.
Eight ventilated expansion slot openings are built into the SilverStone Temjin TJ04-E. These are not designed for tool-free operation. Adding to that, the attachment screws are actually blocked by a removable mesh bracket on the outside. Therefore, in order to install expansion cards, you must first remove two addition screws attaching the removable mesh bracket to access this location. I found this quite a nuisance and an unnecessary inconvenience during my build process. Also, the metal in this location is quite soft; my TJ04-E was noticeably bent here on arrival. It does not appear to be an issue with shipping.
Four 5.25" tool-free, externally accessible drive bays are present on the SilverStone Temjin TJ04-E. Internally, the chassis can accommodate up to nine 3.5" HDDs oriented parallel to the chassis. Eight are to be installed into one removable rack; the ninth one is a separate bay at the bottom of the case. The removable rack required quite a number of screws to take out, which, again, can be an inconvenience to those who swap hard disks often enough. It is almost impossible to install HDDs without taking out the rack due to the installation orientation of the drives.
The SSD rack adjacent to the power supply (Which is basically just a piece of bent metal with three sides and a series of holes in it) can be relocated to the bottom of the aforementioned HDD rack. Any power supply longer than about 160mm will require relocation, and some PSUs will exceed this length, so do keep this in mind. SilverStone argues that the TJ04-E is the only case that can accommodate nine 3.5" hard drives and six 2.5" SSD or HDD "without compromise". Personally, I just cannot see anyone with fifteen (!) drives combined in an ATX system -- not to mention most motherboards don't have support for more than eight SATA ports -- so I think this is more of a marketing deal than anything else.
With that in mind, I have two complaints about this design. Firstly, it is going to be a chore if you need to add any 2.5" drives in the future if you do relocate the rack. You will first have to remove the HDD rack, and then remove the SSD rack after you completed the previous step, in order to gain access. Secondly, the corresponding mounting holes on both sides are misaligned in our review sample. Heck, the piece of metal is not even bent evenly -- one side is longer than the other. I think this is way beyond the manufacturing tolerance of any case manufacturers other than the cheapest no-name brand from China, never mind a prestigious brand like SilverStone. Neither the 3.5" rack nor the 2.5" rack is tool-free, by the way.
Here is a look at other side, where most people don't usually pay attention to. The "front" side intake fan can be seen here. In my opinion, the back of the motherboard tray is quite fundamental to good cabling. This is especially held true with the SilverStone Temjin TJ04-E, since the company actually expects you to run cables through this section. In my opinion, this is, once again, a section where SilverStone hit all the right notes, despite my complaints in the last paragraph. The gap between the side panel and motherboard tray is large enough to accommodate cables of different thickness. The insufficient gap problem is an issue seen on many cases, so I am very excited to see a breath of fresh air here, just like the NZXT Switch 810 we have reviewed back in April, and the Fractal Design Define R4 we are going to review soon. Also, the large motherboard tray is built in conjunction with a sufficient abundance of openings in all the right areas to ensure appearance is not compromised by accessibility. A large motherboard tray is desirable so cables running behind it will not show through on the other side. A good amount of openings placed in the right location is needed, so cables can actually reach this side in the first place. SilverStone got both of it right.
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. Physical Look - Outside
3. Physical Look - Inside
4. Installation and Conclusion
