Building the system

I started off by disassembling the case. This was pretty straight forward and I'm surprised at the amount of engineering that appears to have gone into this thing. Everything is modular and connected with thumb screws for the most part. When everything is together, it adds a certain rigidity to the structure. After a few minutes, the case was completely disassembled and ready to accept hardware.

I began by attaching the motherboard to the tray. Thermaltake has all of the standoffs pre-installed, which was nice. One of the middle standoffs had a rounded protrusion coming out of it that served as a type of guide post to align the motherboard's screw holes with the other standoffs. Again, another subtle, but nice touch. Once the motherboard was on the tray, I installed the CPU, stock heatsink, RAM, and video card.

Next, I installed the hard drives in the hard drive cage. Again, this was pretty straight forward but I was a little puzzled by the location of the HDD cage. It's directly in front of the front 90 mm fan, but it's perpendicular to the direction of the airflow and I don't see how much air would be going over the drives, let alone past them to the rest of the case since the sides of the cage seem to block it like a wall. (A little future mod might remedy this hindrance). While the cage was still outside of the case, I installed the SATA cables and one of the modular power cables. Then I installed the cage back in the case.

Next in line was the optical drive—just a plain Samsung SATA DVD burner with lightscribe. Pretty straightforward here. Again, I attached SATA and power cables before installing back into the case.

Now it was time to slide the motherboard tray back in. As I did, I connected the front panel headers, the PCIe power cable, the motherboard power connectors and the SATA cables.


In hindsight, I should have installed the 8 pin motherboard power connecter sooner, as it was a bit tight to get to. I also should have installed the motherboard tray and power supply before putting the optical drive bay back in as this would've made it easier to route cables. It worked out well enough, though, until I went to push the tray all the way in and screw it in place. At that point, I realized that the SATA cable connectors were running into the HDD cage, preventing it from going in all the way.


It's a minor nuisance, but an issue nonetheless. I see a few ways it can be remedied: using cables with shorter connectors (the supplied EVGA ones seemed sort of long); using right angle connectors; or relocating the HDD cage with a modification or removing it entirely.

If you remove it entirely, you are left with space for only one drive by using the available 3.5” drive bay. I think the possibility of running a RAID array is important, so removing it entirely was not an option. For right now, it's OK sticking out a bit, but this is not a long term solution. Again, I hope to follow up with a second part to this article that will address this issue.

Lastly, I connected the power cables to the PSU and dropped the unit and its bracket into place. I pressed the on button and everything fired up without a problem.