Installation & Noise Level

Installation

Installing the mainboard went without a hitch, but as soon as the four hard drives were installed the first problem surfaced. The Grid has space for five hard drives, but the top space cannot be used if the system is powered by a big graphic card like a 7800/7900GTX or X1800/1900 series card. The PCIe connector will not fit if a hard drive is installed at the same height. So I moved the hard drive down to the bottom to be able to connect PCIe power.

The screw-less drive installation does not hold the drives in place well at all. The drives moved around if a power or IDE/S-ATA cable was connected. If you go to LAN parties, make sure to remove the screw-less locks and screw in the drives the old fashioned way. Maybe the use of rails would have been the better option in this case.

Once the power supply was connected to all the components, the huge mess became apparent. As mentioned before the combination of over 1m long molex connectors, the lack of more S-ATA connectors, the use of 12V pass-through molex connectors on the fans and the lack of cable sleeving really made a huge mess. You will have a hard time cleaning all the cables up. Notice that none of the S-ATA or IDE cables were installed at this point.


Once everything was installed, the PC was turned on. The power LED is bright blue, which does look quite nice. Also the use of the Thermalright Blue Orb 2, which uses a blue LED fan, looked very nice. The blue glow could be seen through the Ultra fan grill and air duct.


The VFD simply looks great in the open drive bay, no matter which way you look at it. All in all the case does look beautiful.

Noise Level

The two 12 cm fans are surprisingly quiet. Even quieter than the Lian-Li fans in the PC-G50 we reviewed here. The power supply fan can be considered quiet as well. The overall noise level can be considered very good.