[Review] Tatu TMJ7 Gaming Case

Introduction

The first thing that pops into our mind when we first heard the brand Tatu was the 90’s one hit song All The Things She Said by the Russian duo group TATU. It really made us somewhat intrigued with the prospect of reviewing the TMJ7 Gaming Casing. A quick googling on the net return us zero/nada/cero hits on neither any reviews nor its own manufacturer website. It’s like it had been sucked into another dimension or something. The only tid-bits of details and data that we could obtain were from some sales sites like Rakuten.my & 11street.my.

Here are some of the details that we could scourge from the net:

Specifications: TATU TMJ7 Gaming Casing
Brand:	TATU
Model:	TMJ7
Type:	ATX / Micro ATX / Mini ITX
Colour:	Silver
Thickness:	2.0mm Aluminium (Panel), 1.0mm SPCC Steel Body & 3.5mm Acrylic Side Panel
Dimension:	220 x 480 x 350mm
Net Weight:	5.3kg
VGA Support:	Below 280mm
Power:	ATX PSU
CPU Cooling:	Below 140mm
Water Cooling:	2x120mm
HDD:	3.5” x2, 2.5” x2. (Expendable to 3.5” x3 / 2.5” x4)
Front Panel:	USB3.0 x2 / USB2.0 x2 / Audio

 

The casing is looking good so far. In this small review, we will be reviewing the TATU TMJ7 Gaming Casing which the folks from Mod n Go Design have been kindly enough to provide us a unit.

Packaging

When the case first arrived at our doorsteps, to say the packaging were minimalist designed really is an understatement. It’s really is just a normal brown box made to fit the case for transportation. Aside from a small tag with the name Tatu stuck to side, there was no other identifier to distinguish it, not even the model name was indicated anywhere on the box.

Opening the box you will be greeted with the case wrapped inside a clear plastic bag to protect it from any scratches and it is sandwiched snugly inside a foam protector to save the case from any dents etc during transportation.

 

Heartbreak no.1: Aside from the case there were no other freebies included except for a bag of screws for your PC assembly. Not even a proper user manual was given, which is to us a really big facepalm thing to do. As bare as the Sahara desert it seems, can’t really blame it for its RM399.00 price I guess, there are not many choices for aluminium casing in the market at the moment with that kind of price.

External

The casing itself is made out of 3 types of material. 2mm aluminium for the main panels, 1mm SECC metal for the frame and 3.5mm Acrylic for its side panels. The case feels really sturdy for its size and seems well build except for some small detailing issues. we really like the design, its simple and elegant kinda remind us of the old Silverstone casing design philosophy of using one clean piece aluminium panel for the front and top.

The front/top aluminium panel is joined together with the rear aluminium panel by simply using rivets. This is where I find it to be lacking a bit, the rivet work is a bit shoddy, you can feel the uneven cut at the tip of your fingers when you run your fingers over them. This is a small setback when you are too accustomed to good rivet works by other casing manufacturers like CoolerMaster & Silverstone. The front of the case is very clean, you can only find a power button, headphone/mic jack, 2x USB2.0 & 2x USB 3.0 ports and that’s it. For added effect the power button lights up blue when you turn on the power.

Not a single 5.25” drive slot is provided, hence this is how the manufacturer able to cut down the length of the case by inches comparing to other mid-tower cases on the market.  For those who still hang to their DVD writers for installing games or watching DVD etc, be prepared to spend a bit more to buy an external solution.

At the rear of the case you will find the usual stuffs, a 12cm exhaust fan placement, 7 PCI/PCIe slots with aluminium ventilated covers, motherboard port placement & ATX PSU compartment. At the bottom of the case are raised feet that should give some degree of clearance to let cool air in through the bottom vents.

The side panels are made out of thick 3.5mm acrylic panel held in place by 4 pieces of black lightweight aluminium screws.

The Inside

The inside of the case is quite roomy, it is painted flat black mostly on the metal SECC parts. You should be able to fit an ITX up to ATX motherboard in here. All the necessary holes for wire management are provided though without any rubber grommet. Fan placement is provided at the top and the front plate for 2x 12cm fans each. Users can take out the plate by unscrewing 2 screws from the side of the plate to dismantle it from the case to attach case fans.

Heartbreak no.2: As you can see, not a single case fan is provided by the manufacturer which is another face palm moment in our book.

Only a power button, harddisk led & power led connector is provided with case. Neither reset button nor internal speaker is provided for assembly. The provided front 2x USB 2.0 & 2x USB 3.0 connector is good thing though because you can never get enough of them for all of your peripherals.

At the back of the motherboard tray, they had provided around 2cm of space for all your cable management needs. This is a plus to us so that you can tuck away all those unwanted cables at the back from any prying eyes.

They had stated the case can accommodate 2x 2.5” drives and 3x 3.5” drives, there are mounting holes to mount a single 2.5” drive at the motherboard tray just beside the PSU compartment and another 2.5” drive at the HDD cage. 3.5” drives are mounted using white plastic HDD tray. If any users wanted to expand this, they could sacrifice some of the fans to mount the hard disk at the fan mounting plates.

Components Installation

Even without a proper manual for installation, the process is a breeze, everything fits nicely and as you can see the case can even fit a large air-cooler like the Noctua NH-D14 though you have to forfeit the top case fan to make it fit.  If you’re planning to use AIO coolers with the case you would be restricted to 120mm type mounted on the rear exhaust vent. To use any 240mm AIO coolers would not be advisable due to the top fan mount does not have any exhaust holes for the hot air to be expelled out of the case. There is enough room for GPUs give and take up to 320mm. Using semi-modular or modular PSU is recommended due to the small space left in between the HDD cage and PSU to stash non modular cables.

Temperature

Due to time constraint, we’ll only be doing a basic CPU temperature test. Here are our testbed specification and our findings:

CPU       : AMD A10 5800K (Turbo Core to 4.2Ghz)

RAM      : 2x2GB Gskill Ripjaws 2000Mhz DDR3

M/B       : ASUS A88X-Plus (BIOS version 2801)

GPU       : MSI R7 240 2GB DDR3

PSU        : Corsair TX650M

SSD        : Mushkin Chronos 120GB

HDD       : WD Green 2TB WD20EARS

CPU Cooler	Minimum Temp (c)	Maximum Temp (c)
AMD Stock Cooler	49	62
Noctua NH-D14	49	56

Heartbreak no 3: Due to the design of the case of having no intake vents at its entire fan placement really take a toll on the CPU temperature. Yes you could minimize the effect a bit by using third party cooling solution, but to us it shouldn’t be that way in the first place. Sure, design is important but practicality is just as important to us. The manufacturer should have estimated this issue during their design process. In our opinion is that, the reason for the temperature to be on the wee high side of things is due to the evident lack of intake vents on the fan placement, that the fans are just simply circulating the available air inside the case, the longer the pc run the hotter the air will be. 

To try and prove our theory, we did 2 different test to see if temperature would improve if better intake of air was introduce to the whole system. First test is just by keeping the side panel open throughout the test and the other test is by making a simple side panel mod with proper intake vent hole inclusive of an intake fan. Here is the result of the test:

CPU Cooler	Minimum Temp (c)	Maximum Temp (c)
Noctua NH-D14 (Reference)	49	56
Noctua NH-D14 (Open Sidepanel)	34	41
Noctua NH-D14 (Modded Sidepanel)	36	46

As you can see by channelling clean cold air from outside into the case really helps in keeping the temperature as low as possible. Having the minimum temp drop from 49c to 34c-36c and max temp from 56c to 41c-46c is a lot by all means. Better temperature means that we can use better and in some case hotter components inside the case than what previously possibly could.

Conclusion

It’s a love-hate relationship with this case. We love the design and choice of material chosen to build the case but we surely hate some of the nagging issues involving the high temperature reading due to inefficient airflow. By all means it doesn’t mean that the case is entirely unusable but when used with our testbed 32nm mule CPU everything does seems going toasty when we run our stress test. It should be much better when paired with other lower wattage CPU’s in the market though.

If you’re in the market for a small footprint mid/mini-tower casing, this case really hits the ballpark. Where in the market could you find an aluminium tower case this size but can fit a full size ATX motherboard at a low RM399.00 price? Most casing with the same league of footprint in the market is at best only able to accommodate up to MATX motherboards. Here’s a small comparison table for your reference:

   

Case Name	Tatu TMJ7	Bitfenix Prodigy M	Bitfenix Phenom	Corsair 350D	Corsair Air 240	CM N200
Width (mm)	220	250	250	210	260	202
Height (mm)	480	404	330	450	397	378
Depth (mm)	350	359	374	440	320	445

  

We really would love to give this case a gold noob award but due to its shortcomings in term of inadequately thought of air intake vents and absence of any freebies case fans and manual guide we had to dig deep and gave it a bronze award instead. Again we would like to say our deepest thank you to the people from Mod n Go Design for making this review possible, I believe if any of you decided to take a plunge in getting this case from them, throw them a few bucks more and they would gladly make u a modded side panel such as ours to tackle your temperature worries.

Pro:

Simple & stylish designed.

Mixture of lightweight aluminium, SECC steel & thick acrylic panel makes a light but sturdy case.

Supports most ITX, MATX & ATX motherboards in the market.

Small footprint for a mid-tower case.

Competitively priced.

Con:

Not so great airflow.

Comes in a bare minimum package, a proper manual with free one or two case fans thrown in would make it a better package.
DVD & Blue-Ray disks lover would cringe at the non-existent 5.25” slot.