A Closer Look - Inside

You may easily remove the side panels of the Setto 1000 by removing the thumb screws in the rear. As you can see, the interior of the case is completely standard. The only really different feature are the plastic screw-less locks. Gigabyte has placed them on every drive bay on one side, but not on the other. This is most likely due to the fact, that these systems do not tend to hold well and will require traditional screws after all. We will, of course, try them out during assembly.


The interior of the side panels is not painted, and there is an air duct to guide cool air to the CPU. This plastic piece will fit, as long as you have an OEM or similar CPU cooler installed. So most budget gamers will find themselves removing the duct. You may also mount an 80 mm fan in this area instead of the air conduit. To remove the external drive bay covers, you are required to pull off the front of the case. It is secured by black plastic clips, which will survive a few such actions, but will easily break off if you are not careful.


Even tough the interior is nothing out of the ordinary, let's take a closer look. The bottom area of the front can hold five hard drives and two external 3.5 inch devices. Before you are wondering, yes the Gigabyte Setto 1000 only has a single such external bay, so the plastic locking mechanism on the blocked one is completely pointeless. Luckily, you may also install a hard drive here as well, but the small white & gray lock will not fit on a hard drive. The hard drive bays are actively cooled by an 120 mm intake fan. Above the 3.5 inch bays are the four 5.25 inch ones. Like I mentioned before, these only have a screw-less system on one side. You better have some extra screws at your disposal in case you are planning to fill the case up.


Turning our focus to the rear of the case, the seven break out mainboard expansion slots are very basic, but Gigabyte has included a metal clip to hold everything in place. This means that you should not need any screws for your expansion cards. The middle holds another 120 mm fan. It is nice to see that Gigabyte has included two such units within the Setto 1000. The OEM trend continues with the power supply bay - no real surprises here.


The Setto 1000 ships with the standard complement of I/O and case connectivity. The only weird aspect is the Firewire adapter found on the normal one. I have yet to see a mainboard that requires such an out of the ordinary plug. One very positive aspect is the fact, that Gigabyte has prerouted both fan cables, sleeved them and joined them together, so you only need a single fan header. There are still plenty of mainboards out there - especially the cheap ones - which only ship with one or two fan headers, so this could come in handy.