Installation

The first step of installing the system into the Thermaltake Element S case is to remove all of those annoying plates that are still attached. Be careful, as the edges may be sharp where they were once attached. Next, I installed the motherboard standoffs in the non-removable motherboard tray.


Even though the tray is not removable, there was plenty of room to work inside the case at this point. As long as you are using a full-size ATX board or smaller (no Extended ATX), the board fits fine.


Next I installed the power supply at the bottom of the case. It is possible to orient the PSU with the fan facing up or down: I chose down to pull cold air in from the bottom of the case. I also installed the video card and started running some of the cables.


Next I placed the cover over the power supply, fitted the support brace along the front edge and tightened the thumbscrews.


I chose to install one DVD-RW drive in the top 5.25" bay. Unfortunately, there are no tool-free mounting options, and I had to screw the drive in place. If you change hardware out a lot this will be an annoyance for you; if you don't, then it won't be an issue.


To install the 3.5" hard drives, first the drives must be prepped with four screws each. You will want to make sure not to mount the screws the same on both sides: the right sides will need to have the middle screw hole used instead of the rear one.


Now the drives will slide into the HDD cage on the screws that were just attached. As you can see on the right side of the cage, the slot does not go all the way to the rear of the cage. This is why the middle screw hole had to be used. Alternatively, if the user wishes to permanently mount the drives, the fourth screw can be placed into the rear holes (shown inside the red box) after the drive is installed.


Cable management has become a very popular topic these days. One common practice is to hide many of the cables behind the motherboard tray. Unfortunately, this will not work in the Element S. The way the tray is designed leaves very little room between the tray and side panel, which prevents the panel from going back on. However, there is ample room to hide cables on the side of the drives, and this allows the side panel to still go back on.


With the components installed in the case, there are few cables showing. I even dug into my spare parts box and installed some extra PCI slot covers and two 60mm fans in the rear panel. The fans seemed like a nice idea until I went to remove the video card, and that is when I found the fans were blocking the screws for the card. Again, this would only be a problem for those that swap hardware often.