Test System

Assembly

Installing the motherboard is done by traditional means. Simply use the spacers and provided screws to hold it in place. There is some room above the board, giving you the possibility to route some cables up and behind the motherboard tray and to the board's top edge. On the bottom end, there is no space, but thanks to the holes in the Shroud, things don't end up looking too bad at this stage.


Both the 3.5" and 2.5" drives are secured with traditional screws. As you can see, I only used two screws to attach the SSD, as X2 does not provide enough.


Installing the fully sized ATX PSU bears no surprises. Simply slide it underneath the shroud through the side and secure it with thumbscrews. As you can see, the 3.5" HDD is pretty close, but there is still enough space to maneuver everything into place.


With everything installed, there is a bit of a cable mess visible through the main side, due to the lack of grommets. However, looking at the rear of the motherboard, I could have wired the case leads out of view a little better. The CPU area is rather large, which leaves the big cooler's backplate unobstructed.

Finished Looks

With the side panels in place and the system turned on, the i5 makes a pretty good impression. The front fan lights up nicely, emitting some light into the bottom half of the chassis underneath the GPU. The power LED bleeds straight forward and into the front of the case, which looks pretty ugly.


Besides that, the fan can clearly be seen when the whole system is viewed from the front. From the side, you can clearly see most of the board, CPU cooler, and graphics card. Luckily, the window is compact enough to hide the right/front unless you really go in for a closer look. In the rear, everything is pretty standard and where you would expect things to be.