Thermaltake Core P5 ATX Wall-Mounted Chassis Review

Peter Donnell / 8 years ago

Final Thoughts

Pricing

If I had to guess the price of the Thermaltake Core P5, I would have gone for over £200, just because it’s quite specialist, obviously not targeted at the wider system building audience, and I would have been completely wrong. The Core P5 is a much more affordable £119.99, which is still a lot of money, but looking at similarly priced full-towers, the Core P5 is well matched in terms of specifications and design.

Overview

This chassis is completely bonkers, and I can’t help but love it despite it numerous flaws and rather over the top design. I’ve absolutely nowhere in my house to put it, at least nowhere suitable as the only supporting wall that’s got room for a desk near it would be the master bedroom, and I don’t think my girlfriend would like this and a desk replacing the bed. That being said, you can floor stand it, or have it on your desktop, but to a certain degree, what would be the point? It’s up on the wall or not at all in my opinion.

The open air design is great for cooling and the fact that you can get a fairly significant air cooler on the CPU, or more importantly, a freaking massive water cooling radiator, in this chassis means that you’ll be able to run a system that is cool, quiet and no doubt wildly overclocked with relative ease. Of course, the open design has a few downsides too, such as dust and debris being able to freely enter the system, so best to keep it in a place that is free from spills, children. pets and so on.

The cable routing looks pretty decent overall, but it wasn’t without its problems. Even on the long cables of our Seasonic PSU, the cable length was an issue and I was literally pulling to the point that I was almost stretching the cables to make them reach their destinations. If you’re going to have a chassis like this, things need to look good, so braided cables are an obviously choice, just remember to make them a few inches longer than you would for even the biggest full-tower chassis.

Being able to mount the GPU in two configurations is a really cool feature. I like the card in both setups, but that’s my point, you have a choice. When you’re building a unique system like this that is obviously designed to show off your hardware, having multiple configurations available is a huge bonus. It’s going to take a long time and no doubt a lot of money to build a system that will do this chassis justice, and not everyone is going to have the space for it, but it’s still a very cool product overall.

Pros

Great build quality
Fantastic way to show off your hardware
Impressive water cooling support
Rock solid build quality
Room for huge graphics cards

Cons

Cable routing holes are tricky to use due to hard drive bays
Super long PSU cables ideally needed
Can be tricky to wall mount or find room for display in general
Open design is prone to dust and debris

Neutral

It’s wildly impractical for most builds, but it is seriously cool

“The Thermaltake Core P5 is one of the best cases we’ve ever seen for those who want to show off their build. I can see these being very popular at gaming events for showing off new hardware, although the practical aspects of having one of these at home are few and far between.”