Zalman MS1000-HS2 Mid-Tower ATX Case Review

Installation

For the installation portion of our review, we installed a mid-range LGA 1156 system with an i7-960 processor, 4GBs of DDR3-1600, Zalman CNPS10X Flex heatsink with two 120mm fans, EVGA P55 FTW motherboard, WD 160GB SATA HD, ATI Radeon 4770 video card, PC Power and Cooling 750W power supply, and a Lite-On DVD burner. The first item we installed was the power supply. This is a simple step and only involves using three screws to secure the PSU to the chassis.

The second step involved unscrewing the back panel PCI cover that allowed us access to the screws securing the PCI slot brackets. Again, this was an easy step so we will move on.

Next, we installed the motherboard, CPU, heatsink and system memory. We basically had all of these parts put together before we installed them into the case. To secure the motherboard to the chassis, we had to use nine screws to securely fasten the motherboard.

We unlocked one of the optical bay quick-release clips and slid in our DVD burner. After pushing it in to the correct depth, we used the quick-release clip to secure the optical drive to the chassis.

We installed our Western Digital 160GB SATA hard drive into one of the removable hard drive trays using the quick-release clips. We could also use four screws to really secure the hard drive to the tray, but it didn’t seem necessary as the drive felt pretty secure using the quick locking mechanism.

After installing the hard drive into one of the trays, we simply slid it into one of the open bays and locked it into place. After that, we connected the SATA data cable and the molex power connector to the back of the hard drive bay cage.

After connecting the rest of the power and data cables, we were able to complete our build in about 35 minutes. This wasn’t bad considering how much cable management I had to do with the extra power supply cables. As you can see from the photo, the 92mm fan at the back of the top hard drive cage is covered a bit by power cables, but it still should get decent airflow to the hard drives. The installation itself was pretty decent, but I would have liked a removable hard drive cage and more tool-less features to save me a few more minutes for cable management during this build.