Installation and Assembly – Part 2
We connected the first part of one of the spider legs with two basic screws and a couple thumbscrews that can be adjusted to move the legs into different positions.
We completed putting all four knee joints on the spider test bench to prep them for the next step in the installation process.
Next, we connected the spider legs to the knee joints with four screws. You can see where the thumbscrews can slide into different positions, which should give users some flexibility in how they want this case to be configured on their desktops.
We completed all four spider legs and knee joints and set them to the lowest setting to show our users how low it can sit. But, we still need to install the power supply bracket, which will be the main body of the “spider” look.
Before we can move on to installing the power supply, we snapped in the cable management clamp. This clamp just popped right in with two clips that worked very well.
To prep the PSU bracket to house the actual power supply we had to install two rubber pads to decrease noise and vibration.
There are two brackets that need to be installed onto each side of our Corsair 400w power supply. This isn’t a modular PSU, so it will be interesting to see how well the cable management clamp works underneath the motherboard tray.
The two sides of the power supply support bracket install directly onto the bottom of the motherboard tray with four thumbscrews. These thumbscrews are adjustable to change the position of the PSU.
Next, we moved on to the top of the motherboard tray where we installed each motherboard standoff using the included tool shown above. This tool worked well at first, but ended up bending and twisting after securing a few standoffs. It was still very handy to use and will help amateur builders who don’t have the right tools on hand.
After more than 60 minutes, we were able to mount the motherboard, CPU, heatsink, and memory to complete the installation portion of our review. Everything came together very well, but we did have some challenges with cable management, which is to be expected with this type of open-air case.
Our 24-pin power connector, LED molex connector, power/reset cables, and SATA data cables were mostly routed through the middle of the chassis. We had to route one of the SATA cables around the left side of the case because it wouldn’t reach from behind the motherboard tray directly. The cable management doesn’t look too bad from this angle, and we were actually able to fit all the power and data cables that were unused to to the cable management clamp.
Here’s a quick shot of the right side of the PC-T1R that shows how the four-pin and 24-pin power connectors are routed and connected to the motherboard. It also gives users a good indication of how the power supply cables are routed from the PSU to the motherboard. Cable management still looks more than adequate for our needs.
To complete the 360-view of the finished mini ITX system, I took this shot above of the PSU and also where the slim optical drive is mounted behind the motherboard tray. The location of the optical drive is a bit awkward, but is still very accessible at the same time. We had a good experience installing all our components, but would have liked a little better cable management options. Overall, the build went very smoothly and should be easy for amateur to intermediate PC builders.
