At the tail-end of our CES 2017 coverage, our visit to the Thermaltake showroom provided a look at upcoming cooling products – as the name might suggest – alongside some spin-offs of existing product lines. The more playful side of the room was outfitted with an original Donkey Kong arcade cabinet look-alike, a case mod by “Thermal Mike” for which we’ll post a separate video, while the rest of the room featured liquid and air cooling products.

Today's focus is on the Thermaltake P1 TG mini-ITX wall-mount enclosure, the Rainbow AIO CLC, and the Engine 27 Sandia-style ($50) cooler.

Thermaltake's updated Riing RGB LED fans that we spotted at Computex have received a few final tweaks prior to production. The new fans succeed Thermaltake's trend-setting Riing RGB fans, building on initial designs by adding a USB-attached hardware controller that can daisy chain sets of 3 RGB LED fans.

This controller is leveraged to allow independent speed and brightness controls, without which both speed and brightness are impacted by regulating voltage delivered to the fan. With most LED-enabled fans, reducing the speed (to a quieter 30%, for example) would also reduce the brightness linearly. This is because the voltage is reduced by the motherboard or host, and therefore all fan components are affected. With the controller, a fixed supply of voltage is delivered to the LEDs, while the speed is independently managed through software. Conversely, if the user wanted to run LEDs at half brightness (or even off), that could be done while retaining 100% fan speed.

Liquid cooling has become infinitely more accessible with plug-and-play AIO solutions, but those lack some of the efficacy and all of the aesthetics. Open loop liquid cooling is alive and well in the enthusiast market; it's a niche of a niche, and one that's satisfied by few manufacturers. We had a chance to stop over at Thermaltake's offices while making the City of Industry circuit last week, and used some of that time to film a brief tutorial on hard tube bending.

It felt like filming a cooking show, at times. The format was similar, but it worked well for this process. Open loop liquid cooling is done with either soft tubing or hard tubing, the latter of which must be heated (with a heat gun) to make necessary bends within the system. Soft tubing is more easily manipulated and is as “plug and play” as it gets with an open loop, though “plug and play” isn't really desirable with open loops. Once you're this deep in cooling, best to go all the way.

PETG hard tubing is more leak resistant by nature of the mounting. Hard tubes are less likely to slip off of their mounting barbs with age or transport (fluid between the tube and its mounting point can lubricate the tube, causing a slip and slow leakage). The downside, as with the rest of open loop cooling, is entirely the time requirement and cost increase. Granted, compared to the rest of the loop, hard tubing cost can start to feel negligible.

We might soon be building a wet bench for open loop liquid cooling, as we're starting to receive GPUs with water blocks for testing. Today, we've got a brief hard tube bending tutorial with Thermaltake's Thermal Mike to lead us into our future open loop content. Take a look at that below:

Almost every PC component comes decorated with RGB lights nowadays – it was only a matter of time before PSU manufacturers started incorporating RGB lights into their products. Thermaltake's doing that, following the success of the Riing RGB fans, and has recently announced the Toughpower DPS G RGB 650W PSU.

The new, colorful PSU is a modular 650W (and 850W) unit with an LED ring around its 140mm fan. The circular LED ring can output 256 different colors and can be changed with Thermaltake’s DPS G PC App.

The power supply comes with a 10-year warranty and an 80 Plus Gold efficiency rating. The long warranty challenges most PSUs, which usually only offer 3- to 5-year warranties. Thermaltake says the PSU is rated to be “91% efficient under real-world conditions.”

We've made it a habit to cover the best gaming cases at every CES show for a few years now, but our (first ever) visit to Computex has revealed something: Computex is a huge show for PC hardware; bigger than CES, in many ways, and that includes new case unveils.

Following our coverage for Computex 2016, this gaming case round-up highlights some of the best PC towers of the year. Several of these cases aren't yet on sale – and some may never be – but the majority of manufacturers are targeting a 2H16 launch for their enclosures. For this best cases of Computex 2016 round-up, we look at SilverStone, Lian-Li, In-Win, Be Quiet!, Corsair, Thermaltake, and Rosewill. Other manufacturers were present in droves – Nanoxia, Cooler Master, Deep Cool, and others – but these were the stand-out cases of booths we visited.

No particular order to the below listing. "HM" stands for "Honorable Mention."

Vendor Battles are our newest form of lighthearted, fun, but informational content. We conducted our first Vendor Battle at PAX East 2016, starring EVGA, MSI, and PNY. Now, at Computex, we turned to the case manufacturers: “You have one minute. Tell me why I should buy your case and not the next manufacturer's.”

It was a fun battle, particularly because all the case teams seem to know each other. George Makris of Corsair opened, followed by Shannon Robb of Thermaltake, and then Christoph Katzer of Be Quiet! All three well-known companies in the space.

Here's the showdown video – direct quotes below.

CES serves as a means to introduce some of the year's biggest product announcements. At last week's show, we saw new GPU architectures, virtual reality 'jetpacks,' Star Wars Destroyer case mods, and a dozen or more cases. Although by no means a definitive listing of all the year's cases, CES 2016 offers a look at what to expect for the annual computer hardware and technology trends and announcements. In the world of cases, it seems that's the trend of power supply shrouds.

This round-up lists the best gaming cases of 2016, including products from NZXT, Corsair, In-Win, Thermaltake, Phanteks, EVGA, and SilverStone. We look at the top PC cases from $50 to $400+, all shown at CES 2016, to best span all major budget ranges for PC builds.

Thermaltake greeted us this year with a steel tank packing two mini-guns. It was the winner of the X9 modding competition and was created by Jesse Palacia, a case modder prolific in the Dirty South PC Mods group on Facebook. The Core X9 was hardly recognizable as the top had been cut down at about a 45-degree angle and the side panels had been sawed through and made into hinged, steel covers. Even though the mod wasn't currently powered, it was still eye catching.

The commonality of RGB lighting in PC components seems to be ever increasing. Despite its rise to ubiquity, RGB LED lighting is still a feature that isn’t included in budget products; for this reason, products that incorporate RGB lighting at a reasonable price point are particularly interesting.

The Thermaltake Poseidon Z RGB is a programmable RGB keyboard currently available for a little under $100 at Amazon and Newegg, making it one of the cheapest programmable RGB keyboards available. And today, we’re reviewing the Poseidon Z RGB mechanical keyboard, following our previous acclaim for Tt eSports’ non-RGB predecessor.

Thermaltake is a prominent case and peripheral brand. This year, they’re holding what they call “the international modding event of the year.” The “2015 Thermaltake Case MOD Invitational Season 2” may not have the most catchy name, but it is a competition for the world’s top case modders from the US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Australia, Russia, Thailand, and the Philippines to transform the Thermaltake Core X9 case with Thermaltake liquid cooling equipment.