Installation
For the installation portion of our review, we installed a water-cooled LGA 1366 system in the Armor A90 case. This involved installing a Gigabyte X58A-UD3R motherboard, i7-920 processor, DVD burner, Raptor 150GB SATA hard drive, Patriot 4GB DDR3-2000 memory, PC Power and Cooling 750W power supply, and an XFX Radeon HD5770 video card. The first item we installed was the DVD burner using the tool-less clipping system.
The next piece of hardware we installed was the PC Power and Cooling 750W power supply. This was a snap and involved using four screws to secure the power supply to the chassis.
Next, we installed the Raptor 150GB SATA hard drive in one of the six 3.5″ bays using the tool-less clips. The clips seemed very secure so I didn’t use any additional screws.
I had to remove the 120mm fan from the back of the case to install the radiator/fan for the Coolit Systems ECO A.L.C. water cooler.
Here’s the end result of our labor. It took more than 30 minutes to get the entire system installed. As you can see from the photo above, the cable management is a mess because of the non-modular power supply we used for this PC. The water cooler helps make the case look less cluttered, but we definitely need to a better job of hiding the power and SATA cables behind the motherboard and 3.5″ bay.
