Installation

Now that I've taken a look at the case it's time to see how practical everything is. I decided to put a standard Pentium 4 system into the case. Nothing much to mention, the only uncommon part is its SCSI controller with a single 7200rpm SCSI disk, though this shouldn't make any difference.

The motherboard fits fine, except for the I/O shield, which doesn't match the board. The case's I/O shield can be removed quite easily though. I had no problems at all when adding the PSU. In fact, I noticed quite some space (about 3 centimeters) between the motherboard and the PSU, this could be nice when the ATX connector has to go here. I also noticed the cables of the front ports and buttons are quite long and slim, they can easily be put behind the PCB so they won't be in the way.


So far, so good. Though when installing my video card and SCSI controller I ran into a very nasty problem. When trying to insert any card, the plastic that should be used for screwless installation of cards was in the way. There was simply no way I could get an expansion card in. I think this is a really bad thing. Luckily the plastic can be removed with 3 screws, this still made me able to put in the cards and put the plastic back. For the SCSI card this went fine, though my video card, a Radeon 9500 by Sapphire, is a bit higher than the metal back plate. This makes the plastic unable to lock the card into place and results in the card being pushed out of it's slot when plugging in the monitor.


I can only conclude that the system to install the expansion cards is poorly designed and Sansun should look into this when designing new cases.

The 5.25" bays seem to be of better design. If you want to remove the front cover of a bay you will have to pull off the whole front of the case, this goes very easily. There is also a metal cover which takes some more force to pull out, though once it's out you're done with them. I decided to take them out all at once, be done with them once and for all. You can easily put a DVD-ROM drive in (or whatever you're installing of course) and lock the plastic holders into place.


The 3.5" bays are a bit questionable. Sure it's nice that you can take them out, but if you want to take them out in a computer that already has the rest installed, you can't since expansion cards and cabling will be in the way. Rotating the bays 90 degrees might have been a better solution for the internal 3.5" bays. Besides this everything works fine and the computer is fully installed.