Thermaltake CTE T500 Air and SWAFAN GT Build

KitGuru has a treat for you today with a Thermaltake PC build that has the bare minimum of RGB lighting. To add to the fun, we have taken the Thermaltake CTE T500 Air case and added a stack of Thermaltake SWAFAN GT12 and GT14 fans which have swappable fan blade rotors. High Pressure, Air Flow and Reverse Air Flow – these fans do it all!

Time stamps
00:00 Start
00:15 The Swafan GT Fans
01:11 CTE T500 Air
03:37 Cooling support
04:18 Storage support and removing bays
05:14 Installing the mobo
06:28 Toughpower GF A3
09:40 Toughliquid Ultra 420 and fans
12:00 GPU Install
12:32 System is built – some analysis
13:32 Swafan GT 12 and GT 14
14:36 Swafan analysis

Thermaltake sent us a stack of hardware for this featured PC build, starting with the CTE T500 Air Full Tower Chassis that comes with three CT140 fans. Details HERE.

The CTE part of the model name stands for Centralized Thermal Efficiency, whichis a familiar from concept from the CTE C750 we reviewed HERE.

The AIO liquid cooler is a large 420mm unit that will fit in the front of the case. You can see full details of the TOUGHLIQUID Ultra 420 All-In-One Liquid Cooler HERE.

Power is handled by the TOUGHPOWER GF A3 Gold 1050W which is ATX 3.0 with details HERE.

For system RAM we have 32GB of TOUGHRAM RC Memory DDR5 5600MT/s which we chose as one oif the few Thermaltake kits that does not have RGB. Details HERE.

Finally we have a selection of SWAFAN GT fans in 120mm and 140mm sizes. James dug into the original RGB SWAFANs HERE and now we have the non-RGB SWAFAN GT models on our test bench. You can read about the SWAFAN GT12 HERE and the SWAFAN GT14 HERE

Specification of Thermaltake CTE T500 Air

• Motherboard support: E-ATX, ATX, Micro-ATX, Mini-ITX.
• Power supply support: ATX.
• Expansion slots: 7.
• Included fans: 1x 140mm front intake, 1x 140mm rear intake, 1x 140mm exhaust.
• Fan mounts: 3x 120mm/140mm front, 2x 120/140mm roof, 3x 120mm/140mm rear, 1x 120mm/140mm floor, 1x 120mm/140mm PSU cover.
• Radiator mounts: 360mm/420mm front, 120mm roof, 360mm/280mm rear.
• 5.25-inch optical drive bays: None.
• Internal drive bays: 4x 3.5-inch/2.5-inch, 2x 2.5-inch.
• Front I/O ports: 2x USB 3.0 Type-A, 1x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C, audio.
• Dimensions: 615mm H x 516mm D x 275mm W.

Test System:

• Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X
• CPU Cooler: Thermaltake ToughLiquid Ultra 420
• Motherboard: Gigabyte X670E Aorus Xtreme
• Memory: 32GB Thermaltake ToughRAM RC DDR5 5600
• Graphics card: Gigabyte RTX 4080 Gaming OC 16GB
• Power supply: Thermaltake ToughPower GF A3 1050W Gold
• Case: Thermaltake CTE T500 Air
• Case Fans: Thermaltake SWAFAN GT12 and GT14
• SSD: Sabrent Rocket 4.0 M.2 NVMe
• OS: Windows 11

Cooling Performance

We give some temperature figures in our video however we have resisted the temptation to provide our usual temperature chart for two main reasons. The first is that our ambient was rather low at 17 and 18 degrees C but the main point is that AMD Zen 4 Ryzen 9 will run at 95 degrees C under most workloads. AMD's technology takes advantage of better cooling to deliver better performance, so the changes we made to fan configuration made very little difference to the results.

Discuss on our Facebook page HERE.

KitGuru says: We had great fun using nine SWAFAN GT fans in the Thermaltake CTE T500 Air and were impressed by the number of options they deliver to the PC builder.

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