Installation

Installation:

I had two major problems with my installation. The first was the power supply;
because the case is so large and tall the ATX power cable was not quite long
enough. I check with another power supply and it was fine showing that I was
correct in stating that SkyHawk needed to lengthen the ATX power cables. Thankfully
they have already passed that onto the engineers. But the lesson stands this
case is large make sure that your power supply has long cables otherwise you
could find your self stretching, fudging, and manipulating to get it in there.
The second issue I encountered also had less to do with the case than my motherboard.
The DFI Lanparty UT Ultra-D has a audio riser card. This card impacted with
the rear exhaust fan and its housing.

In this picture you can clearly see where the audio card hits the fan. If you
look at the profile shot there is almost 1cm of distance between the backplane
and the card.

To fix this situation I removed the fan housing and attached the fan directly
to the back of the case. This gave me the room I needed to fully seat the motherboard.
The audio riser card still makes contact and is ever so slightly angled by the
fan, but I was able to fit the motherboard in the case and thats what
is important. Just keep in mind that if your motherboard has any vertical cards
in the vicinity of the rear exhaust fan then there may be clearance issues with
this case.

I had to drill out the mounting holes on the back in order to fit fan screws
here is the before and after picture. This is what allowed me to mount the fan
directly to the case.

Finaly we have the system up and running. I connected it to my TV just to get
a feel for what a home theater PC would be like and I have to say I want one.
My next build will probably be for the living room. Once the computer was powered
up the CD-ROMs on the front of the case were illuminated by LEDs
in the door creating a nice blue glow. If youre a 24/7 computer user
then you will not want to connect the front LEDs as the generate quite
a bit of light. One of the best things about this case is its thermal properties.
The two 120mm fans create lots of air flow over the CPU and keep it much cooler
than some other cases. My Lian Li PC52 had a load temperature around 55c while
the ThermalRock Circle case kept it around 50c.