Installation Impressions

Working with large cases such as the Cubitek HPTX-Water ice is generally piece of cake and, for the most part, the HPTX-Ice was no exception. For testing nosotros first installed the following hardware: OCZ ZX 1000w PSU, Asrock 890FX Deluxe4 motherboard, 8GB (2x4GB) Kingston RAM, AMD Phenom II X6 1100T CPU with the Prolimatech Megahalems and Inno3D GeForce GTX 580 OC GPU. We as well crammed in half a dozen Western Digital Scorpio Blueish 500GB HDDs and a Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 1TB drive.

We kicked things off by installing the Prolimatech Megahalems CPU bracket to the back of the Asrock 890FX Deluxe4, though forgetting this stride is no biggie, as it tin can be performed with the board installed thanks to that pigsty in the motherboard tray. The motherboard slotted into place without whatsoever fuss and connecting everything else was as like shooting fish in a barrel as can exist.

Installation of the optical drive, in this instance a DVD-RW, was very straightforward as Cubitek went with the traditional method here. Installing the hard drives was just as simple, though slightly less conventional as you must attach four safety wheels to the drives before inserting them into the trophy.

In one case inserted, there'due south a thin aluminum strip that slides across the drive bay locking the drives into identify. This method works well, but for a $360 example, we were disappointed to observe a consummate lack of hot-swappable drive bays.

Installing the OCZ ZX 1000w PSU was very elementary using the bottom mounting position, and in that location was loads of room to accommodate an fifty-fifty bigger power supply, such as the Thermaltake Toughpower 1500w, should y'all need such an insane unit. While nosotros just took photos of one power supply installed, we successfully installed two without whatever issues. Likewise, nosotros photographed the HPTX-Water ice with just 1 GeForce GTX 580 installed, but we found that it easily handles ii or more.

Extra-long graphics cards that overhang the motherboard, such every bit the Radeon HD 6990, fit with surprising ease, equally there is an insane 17" of clearance. As shown in the photo, at that place is plenty of room behind the graphics bill of fare so installing things such as boosted power cables should exist problem-free.

During installation, we plant that cable management only caters to the HPTX form factor. Although this is an HPTX case, people will inevitably use it for other board sizes. When using ATX boards as nosotros did, things can be quite messy, every bit cables take to stretch quite a distance from the holes to components.

Some other problem: once hardware was installed, we couldn't re-attach the right door flush. At best, we concluded up with a slight bow in the door, which looked strange.

With everything installed and the doors squeezed on, nosotros turned the organization on. And then we turned information technology right dorsum off, as the front end fan was making a loud dissonance like it was hitting a cable. We removed the doors over again and inspected the fan, though we didn't meet a problem immediately. So we dug deeper.

After removing the fan, we discovered that information technology was sucking in the grit filter and this was causing all the racket. There didn't appear to be any way to solve this other than removing the dust filter, which we did, and the fan worked fine.