Installation

The first piece of hardware I installed within the X-Fighter was the Motherboard.  This proved to be much more difficult than it had been with any other case.  The VGA Cooler got in the way quite a bit and made inserting the motherboard a bit of a problem.  I therefore had no choice but to take the cooler out during the motherboard installation.  Other than the cooler problem, the motherboard went in very well, and was secured solidly with the included screws.  Cable management would be fairly easy in the X-Fighter as there are a few gaps in the back plate to feed the cables through, the gaps may not be big enough for some of the cables though.

Installing any of your drives is a very easy task with the X-Fighter.  I reckon it’s probably easier than the Thermaltake Element T’s screw method as well.  The included Drive Rails are all packed in together on a hard, black piece of plastic that you can only remove if you take off the front panel.  This process is very simple, the rail just sits on the side of the hard drive (placing the attached metal rods into the holes where the screws would normally go) and then slides in and locks into place.

To install any 5.25” drive, the front panel has to be removed.  The removal of the front panel is relatively tricky as one clip on the right side of the panel is sat in such a position that just pulling the panel off is not an option, so you have to push the panel up and then try to pull all of the clips away from the rest of the case.  The front panel is made out of a flimsy ABS plastic so pull too hard when trying to remove it and you could be in trouble. There is also some foam in front of the drive bay panels which helps to stop dust and dampen the sound of the fans.

The 5.25” drives use the same mechanism as the other drives so the drive just slides straight in and clips into position.  No screws are needed during any of the drive installations.

After installing all of the hardware you can see what she looks like.  As you can see, there is not much room underneath the motherboard as the cooling system is taking up all of the space.  One thing I don’t like about top mounted PSUs is the fact that there is hardly anywhere to put the remaining cables so all of mine have ended up underneath the DVD Drive which could cause a problem if I bought another DVD Drive.

Finished Job

Thankfully, the X-Fighter powered up first time round. I noticed once powered up the amazing lights that surrounded the power button.  Six lights in total that flash faster depending on your HDD and PSU usage.