System Assembly Tips

The only thing you should take care in advance concerns with the mainboard back panel. The panel shipped with the case is very unlikely to go well with all the mainboards, so the best thing you can do is to make sure that the panel shipped with the mainboard is right at hand.

The system assembly doesn’t cause any problems and can be performed very easily. The mainboard with the CPU and memory sits on the special stands included with the case, the drives fit smoothly into the bays and baskets, USB and sound connectors on the top panel of the case find their pins on the mainboard, and power supply cables reach easily to all internal devices. The graphics card can be installed in three simple moves, as the case is equipped with screw-free fastening locks for the expansion cards on the back panel.

Well, let’s turn it on right now…

The sight is definitely beautiful: the front panel is lit up with two LEDs, and the shining 120-mm fan on the case back panel sees through the transparent side window:

With the lights turned off the whole thing looks even more impressive:

Well, the lighting does look beautiful, but I wonder why they didn’t go away from the super-bright blue diodes and use something like green or soft golden lights? I am sure the case would look not any worse, but the eyes would feel much better without this “acid” blue light, especially if the case stands on the desk or faces the user.

Of course, everything concerning the lighting and LEDs is our purely subjective opinion. Another subjective estimate is connected with the noise level of this solution. When the system is powered up the room fills with pretty loud noise. By disconnecting the fans one by one we managed to figure out that one of the PSU fans is the noisiest of all. The noise generated by this particular fan is louder than the noise generated by all other fans of the system case altogether. I assume that this shouldn’t be the case, and maybe the sample we got for review had ill-balanced PSU fan. If this supposition is incorrect, then I believe you will have to replace the PSU fans or the entire PSU unit to reduce the noisiness of your system.

Other system fans work much quieter, but if you still feel uncomfortable with the remaining noise, you can try feeding lower power to the fans with the help of the power supply regulators from the same Thermaltake Company. In this case the ability to monitor the fan rotation speeds will definitely come in handy.