Aspire X-QPack: A Lanparty Dream

Installation Cont'd

After connecting up all the cables, including the two sensors for the front-mounted temperature display, we were ready to put the custom-sized power supply back in. It is this step which reminds you just how tight everything is in this unit, but keep in mind we have a nice beefy 420 watt power supply we're working with, not a 250 or 300 watt one like the ones that come with most small form factor pc's.

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One more shot with everything installed viewed from the other side. Here one can see what we meant by using the extra space up front for 'cable management'. We should note how if our motherboard had supported external USB and Firewire connections, some of that cable clutter would be greatly reduced.

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With everything installed, it's time to put the cover back on. This is when one of the only real problems we found with this case came to light. While we didn't actually cut ourselves working on the unit, in putting the cover back on one of the side windows came down across the HDD cage and received a nasty scratch. We checked the edge and it did not appear to have been deburred at all. We looked carefully at other edges in the case and came to the conclusion that hardly any of them had been smoothed out. Many of the edges had been tucked around into bends though, which explains why we didn't hurt ourselves working on the case. Just be sure to be careful and it should not be too much of a problem, but then again Aspire could have put just a little extra attention to detail in there and made sure all the edges had been smoothed over.

Once the cover was replaced, we noticed how overall the windows do a nice job of showing off the internal components. Here is a small gallery of pics just showing the case with everything installed, some with the unit powered on to show the LED fans.

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