For those of you who lived under a rock last year and completely missed out on the BMW Group Designworks USA inspired Level 10, Let me bring you up to speed real quick. To understand this design, you have to first envision a thick, vertically mounted motherboard tray attached to a wide flat base. Unlike a typical chassis', there wasn't the "boxed" look with this chassis at all. In this design everything was mounted to the motherboard tray for support. In the front you had and optical bay rack that was in a separate compartment than the hard drive, and which each received their own slim covers. The top half of the motherboard used a small cover to go over the CPU cooler and PWM area of the motherboard, while yet another hinged compartment covered the expansion cards. This design is very unique, and was very impressive upon release. The biggest problem with the Level 10 I saw was the devastating price tag!

So what does Thermaltake do? They took all of the response from the Level 10, and went back to the drawing board to workshop some new ideas to bring costs down, but still leave the basic appeal of the original Level 10. What is surprising to me is that on top of trying to keep features that set the bar so high on the Level 10, there are actually some very user friendly improvements to be found in the new release from Thermaltake. So in reality, to some, this chassis will have what the Level 10 lacked, and ends up being, in my opinion, a better layout and thermal design than the original concept could offer.