Assembly

Installing the motherboard is done by traditional means, with the use of the included spacers. There is a lot of space around the motherboard, especially above it. You should then be able to install a thick radiator there without any problems. The plastic locking mechanism for the motherboard-expansion slots does require quite a bit of though love to snap back into place with a graphics card installed, but it holds things in place nicely.


To install a hard drive within the GT-S Black Edition, simply pick the tray of your choice and install the 2.5" or 3.5" drive with the use of the included screws. It would have been nice to see a screw-less version, but this implementation does work well.


Put away the screwdriver after filling up those trays. Simply slide the full tray into the bay of your choice until it snaps into place. You should now not have to worry about it coming loose on its own.


Installing an optical drive isn't supposed to take any tools. Just pop the bay cover of your choice out and slide the drive into place. Once positioned properly, push the red plastic buttons down and slide them over to pin the drive down. This is a great idea and Aerocool is not the first company to offer such a locking system, but its GT-S Black Edition implementation does not work at all. Pressing on the front bezel of the drive pops the locks open, leaving the drive to dangle around loosely within the bay. The locks taking up all mounting holes of the drive bay also forces you to detach them completely only to revert to traditional screws. Sorry, Aerocool, but this particular iteration is an epic fail. Next time, just include red or black thumbscrews instead.


Adding a PSU to the chassis requires the use of a screwdriver since you have to attach the unit using traditional screws. But the GT-S Black Edition's large size should allow you to install any one large power supply.


With everything in place, the GT-S Black Edition looks very clean, but its colorful cables are a slight eye sore. The numerous cable hooks on the backside of the motherboard tray made keeping things tidy a breeze, and every ugly lead was successfully routed to be held in place securely and out of sight.

Finished Looks

Before turning on the system, the front cover was applied. As mentioned before, it uses magnets to hold in place. You may place it anywhere on the metal mesh area of the front—it could cover the front drive bays or the lower air vent. While a nice little visual addition that gives the chassis race stripes, you do not want to cover up the front intake fan with a solid panel. Those users utilizing the optical drive bay will even end up leaving the cover off out of pure laziness. Once turned on, all three fans and the four embedded LEDs in the front light up red, which makes the chassis look pretty snazzy.


The use of LED-equipped fans in the rear and top of the chassis is great, as it floods the interior of the chassis with red light. But Aerocool unfortunately installed a blue power LED into the GT-S Black Edition, with the hard-drive LED in red. I would have liked a red power LED because it would have kept all lighting elements across the chassis uniform.


Turning the case around, one can see the full motherboard, all expansion cards, CPU cooler, and the power supply clearly. There are two vents on the window for additional cooling units there, which could prove helpful in keeping your graphics card cool, for example, or when using water-cooling, as that would push air across the motherboard instead of a traditional heatsink and fan combo.