CoolIT Boreas MTEC Chassis Review

Interior Impressions

Before we get into the inner workings of the interior of the Boreas MTEC Chassis, lets start with a good old fashioned shot of the case so you can get a good feel for what it looks like with the side case off. The Boreas cooling unit really is that big and it does take up a good chunk of real estate; luckily the TJ07 was designed with watercooling in mind the Boreas fits nicely without making too many compromises.

In the next section we will take a close look at the BOREAS setup, but for now lets concentrate on the case and see how user-friendly it is (or is not).


In most cases it would be an unfortunate oversight to have “only” 92mm fans as the exhaust fans; however (and is becoming a reoccurring theme in this review) this unit is the exception. The standard TJ07 is marketed as a watercooling case and as such the exhaust fans don’t have to cope with all the heat created by the CPU (nor the video cards in most instances). These fans are there to keep the motherboard itself and all its relatively hot running parts cool in a normally low airflow environment.


Of course, not everyone will want to go for the setup with GPU blocks et al and may want to have only the CPU taken care of by the Boreas (like we did). For all these customers CoolIT (via Silverstone) have included dual 92mm fans on the back and dual 120mm fans on the top. More importantly, Boreas itself -which sits basically in front of the GPU's location- sucks a lot of air out of the case. This means even passively cooled graphics cards should have enough air movement to keep them nice and cool. All in all it’s a brilliant setup which should keep a wide range of customers happy with their new purchase.


As for the fans themselves lets start with the 92mm fans. These 92mm fans are Silverstone branded and are made by Martech. While not much is known about these fans, one thing is certain: if Silverstone is willing to put their name on it they must be good. The Martech DF0922512RFMN, is a 9 bladed fan which is rated for 2100rpms and a low 23DBA. We usually like to see these fans mounted with vibration dampening material rather than screws, but the amount of vibrations these created resulted in very little additional noise. Please don't get us wrong, they do make some additional noise, but even if you used vibration dampening material the fact of the matter is these 92mm fans are not overly quiet. They are probably quiet enough for most people, but they would be one of the first things we would replace if we were building a custom case for high end systems.


As mentioned before this chassis comes with four 120mm fans, two of which are for hard drive cooling. These two fans intake fresh air from behind the bottom mesh, sucking air over the hard drive(s) and then exhaust said air out the other side of the case. The top two fans can either suck air in from above and deposit it inside the case or suck hot air from the top of the case and blow it out the meshed top vent holes.

All four 120mm fans are the same fan; unlike their 92mm brethren however, these Silverstone branded fans are made by Everflow. In this instance all four fans are 9 bladed Everflow F121225SL (AKA Silverstone FN121 fans) which are rated for 48 CFM, with a mere .91mm H20 static pressure at 1100 RPMS. On the bright side, and unlike the 92mm fans, these are fairly quiet fans which do their job with aplomb and really don’t need to be replaced until they wear out.


Focusing in on the peripheral slots (aka “PCI slots”) the very first thing which stands out is that rather than gimmicky “tool free” plastic clips or other similar setups, you have good old fashioned metal brackets and screws. Technically, this is a tool free setup as CoolIT / Silverstone have upgraded the screws to more of the knurled screws found on the outside.


When we zoom on over to the 5.25” bay drives, things are not as rosy as once again there is no tool-less mounting contraptions; nor is there any of those screwdriver-less knurled screws. If you want to install an optical drive you first have to remove a couple of screws and yank out the metal blanking plate then push in your drive and screw it in…just like we had to do back in the dark ages of computers (circa late 1980s). Would a bunch of those thumb screws added much to the cost of the unit?