Building a System

Since Corsair doesn't ship an installation-manual, you've got to think and discover how to install everything by yourself. I found that there's no specific order needed, but I recommend starting with external drives and move to internal drives and PSU after that. Installing an optical drive was very easy, as you insert the drive until it matches with the required drive holes and from there, you only need to move the clip to the right side to lock it. I found myself fighting to install it more than 5 times to discover this lock was not long enough to keep my drive in position. In fact, I could move the drive with a single finger even with the plastic lock, so I had to remove the right panel and put a pair of screws to protect it from moving. Also, I could add a pair of screws just below the lock to make it "easier", but it shouldn't work like this. I tried with another drive but it was the same. I don't really know if this was a bad sample or every 700D is done this way, or perhaps, it could be my drives (LG, by the way), but this problem literally lefts out of the game those fancy plastic locks. I wasn't happy with this.

Fortunately, installing internal drives was a breeze and everything worked as it should. If you're installing a 3.5" drive, you just need to slide it on the plastic brackets, but if you're installing 2.5" drives (SSD for example), you'll need to screw them from below. All the brackets have 2.5" holes, so you can fit up to 6 SSDs if you want. That should be more than enough.

Just to make sure any CPU heatsink can be installed without removing the motherboard, here's a photo showing a Noctua's NH-D14 back plate. The space is more than enough for any motherboard and CPU heatsink.

Now that I've installed my whole system, this is how it looks at the end. Pretty nice, isn't it? Actually, my mighty ASUS Maximus III Formula looks minimized in this case, and the X58 E-ATX motherboard shouldn't look that different. The HD5850 also looks very small compared to the main chamber's length, so if you want to install a pair of HD5970s you still have plenty of room to do so. Overall, you'll find this case lets you build a very clean system as 90% of the cables can be hidden behind the motherboard's tray. I find this quite useful to improve aesthetics and, of course, to improve cooling. Even if you're not an expert building cases, this might be the chance to look like it.

Now take a look at the back of the motherboard's tray; you'll find all your cables here. I've done a decent job trying to keep them ordered and rubber grommets help a lot. I recommend using a semi-modular PSU since you won't be able to hide all your cables behind this tray with a non-modular PSU. How deep is this space for cable-management? Well, there are 25mm between the motherboard tray and the side panel, so, you have plenty of space to work.

Finally, this is how the rear looks with a system installed. I just wish my GPU had a black painted PCI-end to match with the case as it does with my I/O panel.

There are some installation details I still want to show you before moving to final thoughts and conclusions, so, please follow me to the next page...

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