Assembly

Before we dive into assembly, let us take a look at the connectors of the chassis. These are of the standard variety. Thermaltake has not color coded the audio ones, so you will need to turn them around to check which one is for HD or AC97.


Installing the mainboard is done easily with the use of the supplied spacers and screws. There is plenty of space above and below the mainboard area. The locking mechanism does work well - if it stays in place. The locks themselves are made of plastic, with little hinges procuring into metal pieces so that you may open and close them. At times these hinges jump out of the metal part, due to the pressure. Nonetheless, that only happened once during installation and the system did hold the card in place quite well.


The locking system to hold the hard drives in place within the trays is actually not as good. It does not stay in place at all and you will have to watch 'em like a hawk when sliding the tray back into the system.


Once you are past the locks on the tray, the big lock to hold the entire tray in place does the job very well. Now, I did mention the fact that I see very little reason in turning the hard drive cages to face outward toward the front of the chassis. The rear of these trays bear the reason: there is not backplate or holding mechanism for the cables. So why would you want to pull a hard drive out the front, if you need to open the side panel to reconnect the drive anyways? Once again, a nice possibility with very little real life benefit.


Installing the optical drive does require removal of the entire front panel. Once it is in place, push down the lock and that should do it. I do suggest that you use a single screw to hold it in place nonetheless if you are going to take the case to a LAN party. The power supply is installed traditionally with the supplied screws.


After everything is installed, I placed the plastic dividers/covers back into the case. As you can see, it divides the board right by the Northbridge. Fact is, not every mainboard is created equal. I do see problems arising with boards with memory slots located above the CPU. This would move everything downward, so large CPU coolers will collide with the divider.



The rear does look quite clean, as the cable mess is hidden below the CRM panels. This should help in placing the side panel back on the chassis.