Installation & Finished Look

Installation

Installing the drives was very easy. The included drive cages made installing the drives painless. The only other, better method would have been the use of drive rails. the same goes for the floppy drive. I had to line up the floppy drive with the case front first, before taking this picture. so I actually had to screw the floppy drive in, while the cage was inside the case. Drive rails would have eliminated the problem. The optical drives were installed the old fashion way, by sliding them into the case and securing them with screws.


Installing the mainboard was straight forward. Just screw in the stand-offs and install the motherboard and all the cards.


Once I slid in the mainboard tray, the hard drive cage located under the power supply obstructed the fan, so I had to remove it. Having the option of installing so many hard drives in a case may be very nice, but with today's large CPU coolers the odds of everything fitting is quite slim. You will have to use water cooling to make 100% sure that you are still able to use the additional hard drive cage.

Finished Look

Once everything was installed and connected, the benefit of such a wide case becomes apparent. I had so much space to clean away cables and route them, invisible to the user. There is so much space besides the power supply and toward the top of the case, that you will not have any troubles even using a 1000W power supply in this system. This case is simply perfect for the use of Quad SLI or other full length add-in cards, without having to move to a full tower case.

Once the sides were closed and everything was installed, the door was opened again, and this picture was taken. I had to move my SATA drive tray in the 5.25" bay back a few millimeters to be able to close the door, but this was to be expected. There will always be problems with using anything other than flat devices in cases with doors.


This is how the case looks when everything is closed up. Looks quite elegant if you ask me. The power LED is bright blue, while the hard drive LED is green. Even though the green may be just as bright as the blue, the color blue is one of the brightest colors so the green is drowned a tad bit.