Installation

Installed Equipment
• AMD 2500 Barton w/Spire Falconrock II cooler
• Abit NF7-S rev2 motherboard
• Corsair TwinX 2700 DDR 333 RAM
• Asus V9280S Geforce4 Graphics Card
• Coolermaster Musketeer II
• 32x CD-ROM
• Netgear WG311T Wireless Adaptor
• Maxtor 80gig 7200rpm Hard Drive

The installation was almost tool free. The hard drive rails still need to be attached with the provided screws in order to work with the system. The case wanted to tip pretty badly when I got everything installed. Using the feet is not negotiable!

The 5.25” rail system uses one rail per drive, and works pretty well. There are two pressure tabs on the opposite side of the rail to help keep the device steady, but it takes a fair amount of pressure to get the drive to slide in. The system worked well with both the CD-ROM and the Musketeer II. Another unique item is the replaceable 5.25” bay covers. I’m not sure anyone would notice if they were there or not, but they are nicer and easier to work with than the knock off type. They overlap a little bit, and the lower ones have to be installed first in order to fit right.

The motherboard tray was a little interesting. The clips are just a hair out of alignment with the holes on the NF7-S, and I had to be very careful to be sure I wouldn’t damage the board during the install. I’m not sure it’ll be much fun taking the NF7-S out either – but it was certainly tool free.

There is no chassis indicator for HDD activity, and the only two chassis lines are for the power switch and power. I simply hooked up the motherboard header to the HDD indicator on the Musketeer II…problem solved.

**click to enlarge**
 

The included CCFL has adjustable ends, allowing a lot of mounting options. The CCFL included a switch and inverter, as well as a PCI cover that you can mount the switch.

Finally, a couple of shots fully installed and powered.

Testing

Testing consisted of running the system for an hour to get an idle baseline, then loading the system with Burnintest 4 Pro. Temperatures were taken using Motherboard Monitor 5.

Ambient Temperature: 24.7°C

Not too bad! Apparently the ‘Swiss cheese’ grillwork in the front does the job adequately. 5°C over the ambient temperature is about average for the gaming cases we’ve looked at recently. Case temps moved only 2°C, which puts it behind the Guardian, but ahead of the Z-Alien which had almost a 4° change. Another item worth mentioning was the CPU temps were back down to 49°C about 15 minutes after I shut down Burnintest 4, but the case temps were still about 2° higher than idle. This tells us that the duct system works very well at bringing cool air exactly to where it’s needed…although if your heatsink is very tall you might run out of room. The Spire Falconrock II on the test system was just short enough to work with the duct.

Next: Conclusions