[section_title title=Conclusion]
Conclusion
Now that I have had a chance to put the Cooltek U2 through its paces, lets see how it has managed to handle itself, mainly against the much larger and more established BitFenix Prodigy.
The main thing which will strike anyone who sees this case is its size. It is so small it actually made getting our ITX system into it a little bit of a challenge. Never the less, it is beautifully finished in the gorgeous anodised black brushed aluminium finish. The front of the chassis is very minimalist, maybe too minimalist for some, but this gives it a brilliant aesthetic for a HTPC. With a HTPC you want something which is going to blend into your living room and not take away from the look of the room or draw your attention away from the television. Whilst on the subject of HTPC, this is what I consider to be the U2’s primary function. Yes, there are going to be some people out there who are going to want to use it as a small form factor gaming rig, I have even seen one badly modded, but that is not what it is designed to do, just look at the maximum length of the graphics cards, its just not designed to accommodate them.
In the thermal and acoustic tests the U2 performed admirably, pretty much sitting in the middle of the pack for most of them. This is very impressive considering that it is only using one 120mm fan as an exhaust but maybe not so surprising as it is pushing the hot air from the Noctua cooler straight out the case. In regards to the acoustic results. They may look a little high up on the graphs but please bare in mind that this is with an overclocked i7 processor, something that you should not be using in a HTPC or office computer. If you were to use a low powered chip, such as an i3, then you could even get away with passively cooling it and the small graphics card and then achieve pure silence.
In summary, the Cooltek U2 is a very good, compact and stylish case which I would not hesitate using as a HTPC chassis if I had the need for one. It performed admirably against other cases in the thermal and acoustic tests, and the build quality and attention to detail look brilliant. The only thing that I could criticise Cooltek for is not giving the option for people to mount a fan in the floor of the case, because if you were going to passively cool the system it would help a lot. Also the introduction of some dust filtering around the intake would probably help in the long term too. As there are no big issues with the chassis, I am happy to award the Cooltek U2 with our Design and Value awards.
I would like to thank Cooltek for giving us this sample and hope to see more from them in the future.
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Performance
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Design
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Value
Summary
The Cooltek U2 is currently the smallest and lightest chassis we have had to test here at Play3r. I have to say that for its size and relative lack of features it has performed admirably, able to stay with the much bigger BitFenix Prodigy most of the way. Being able to combine style, functionality and size into an affordable package, the Cooltek U2 is very much deserving of its awards.
where is the test ?? i can see only text.
This is one of our older reviews where we used to use a different format for presentation – instead of all the info being shown in one page we used to split the reviews up into navigable pages so people could jump to the results they specifically wanted to see. You should see a orange navigation bar at the bottom of each review (above the comments section) and you can either click on the appropriate page number or select from the drop-down menu. We will eventually change all these older reviews to the current single page format but it’s a laborious process and we simply haven’t had the opportunity to complete the task yet.