Wiring Up The Case!

Alright.. We have all done this before, so let’s go through it real quick. First, we plugged in the main ATX power cable as well as the CPU power cable. As is the case with all bottom-mounted PSUs and ATX motherboards, the CPU power cable gets stretched across the motherboard's expansion slots. We will take a closer look at that after the graphics card is installed.

Next, we hooked up the top-mounted I/O and control center which were angled towards the front of the case for easy accessibility. They contain the power and reset switches as well as two USB 2.0 and one E-SATA ports. There are also audio out and microphone in jacks.

We won’t go into details of the other cables. Wiring up SATA and IDE devices are very straightforward. Instead. we will move on to the memory modules, graphics card and PCI card installation and then focus on the case fan solutions provided by NZXT.

Installing The Memory Modules & Expansion Cards

Always install the memory modules before installing any expansion cards, especially on an ATX motherboard where the graphics card (PCI Express or AGP) slot is located in close proximity to the RAM slots. Installing the graphics card was then a piece of cake.

However, NZXT appears to have gone with the old-school bolt-fastened approach for PCI Express and PCI expansion cards, as opposed to the quick-release solutions provided by other companies such as Dell. This made installing the cards a bit more work because you need to use tools whenever you want to change a cards. On the other hand, this was a more secure way of keeping the cards in place.

As we can see, both the dual-slot Gainward Bliss 9600 GT and the Auzentech X-Plosion cards were installed without any issue. You can also see how the CPU power cable stretches over the two cards. This is not NZXT's fault but rather something that needs to be addressed by the industry.

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