Review System

Assembly

Before starting the assembly process, removing all the panels is probably a good first step. For complicated builds, you may remove the bottom panel as well, but in our case, as we are planning to install and wire up a 2.5" drive, we left that one in place.


Adding a motherboard is pretty straightforward, using screws and spacers. It is quite the snug fit, with the connectors at the top of the board being pretty hard to reach, but that is to be expected. Adding the 2.5" SSD is easily done by using the special screws and mounting it onto the floor of the chassis.


We initially prepped the PSU by inserting it into its frame and pre-wiring the I/O cables as well as pre-attaching the SATA data cable to the SSD. There is a bit of room even with an SFX-L unit, but once it is installed, you will really loose any ability to cleanly route things easily unless you flip the case over and take off the bottom panel.


Once the power supply is installed, all the excess cable can be bunched up on the floor of the case, which should still give you plenty of room above it for your GPU.


With a mere 55 mm clearance for a CPU cooler, the A4-H2O—as its name implies—is really made for liquid coolers. You may prepare such a unit by detaching the mounting frame from the top and securing your 240 mm AIO to it, which is then be dropped into the top pretty easily. The only thing we learned the hard way was that there is only a small opening between the PSU and motherboard through which to route the AIO tubing, so you have to juggle both parts at once to get it all set up correctly. Once installed and with a bit of time spend on cable management, you can see how tight thing are. That said, we really made our lives a little bit more difficult by using tall memory modules as well. The AIO compartment has no barriers, like a vent to keep loose wires from interfering with fan blades, so you either have to get grilles of your own or take the time to secure cables properly.


After all that work, adding the GPU is a breeze, and with its dedicated compartment on the right side, it should manage its own thermals quite well.


With everything installed, the side with the motherboard is filled to the rim, while the other is the polar opposite with lots of room. Any excess cables you have can be stored here, but as the chassis has no real points for cable ties, it is all about just bunching them up as well as you can.

Finished Looks

With the panels back in place, you will notice an ever so gentle bulge on the side of the motherboard. This is mainly due to the fact that we employed high-profile memory, which forced us to bunch up the cables in the gap between the memory and PSU bracket. Using low-profile or standard-height DIMMs should give you lots of additional room to spread things out a bit. As there are no LEDs, the only way to visually see if the system is powered on are the internal lighting elements of your components.


The air vents on the panels are big enough to make out parts within with embedded RGB components. In the rear, everything is where you would expect it.