Installation Impressions
The Level 10 GT is a pleasure to work with, much easier than the original Level 10 thanks to its more traditional design. This design also provides better cooling for all the internal components and as we just mentioned Thermaltake has installed a number of large fans to maximize the cooling performance. When installing our gaming hardware, we saw no need to alter the cooling setup in anyway.
The Level 10 GT also excels in cable management and we found it extremely easy to keep things tidy with the holes in the motherboard tray.
It's worth noting that the right case door has a bulge for extra wide connectors and cables to be stored, and there are tabs on the motherboard tray for cable ties.
To be perfectly honest, we found no problems with the layout of the Level 10 GT. Being such a large case, it easily accommodated our gaming components and the same should be true for tomorrow's enthusiast hardware.
We installed the following: OCZ ZX Series 1000w PSU, Gigabyte G1 Sniper motherboard, Intel Core i7 980X processor, Prolimatech Mega Shadow cooler, 6GB AData system memory, two AMD Radeon HD 6970 graphics cards, two 2TB Samsung hard drives and one OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD.
The Level 10 GT supports EATX (extended ATX), so motherboards as tall as 13" will fit comfortably. The case comes with standard mounting screws that you must install for your motherboard.
Despite lacking a removable motherboard tray, we had no problem installing the Gigabyte G1 Sniper motherboard. Furthermore, with rear access to the motherboards CPU socket, we were easily able to install the Prolimatech Mega Shadow cooler with the motherboard inserted.
Both the AMD Radeon HD 6970 and even the HD 6990 fit with room to spare. The Level 10 GT has proven to be an ideal gaming PC case as it can easily house a number of high-end graphics cards. We installed two Radeon HD 6970s for our testing and installing more would be possible.
The five hot-swappable drive bays are one of our favorite features as they make it incredibly easy to install disk drives. Once the drive bays are connected to the motherboard, you never need to touch another SATA data or power cable again. This is certainly a feature that all computer cases north of $200 should include.
To use the front I/O panel's USB 3.0 connectors, you have to run the blue USB 3.0 cables through one of the water cooling holes or an expansion slot. While on the subject of front panel connectors, we were happy to see that Thermaltake used black cables for the USB 2.0 ports as well as the front panel audio. This helps them blend in with the black paint throughout the Level 10 GT design.