Testing Assembly:

    The hard drive rails work quite well, exactly as designed. Connecting the interface and power cable is somewhat inconvenient after sliding the drives in but this is easily remedied by cabling them before mounting. The rails comfortably accommodate two drives end to end but if you force the drives in you have a great likelihood of breaking SATA connectors.

Mobo Dropped In

HDD & Power Mounted

Mobo Retention Post

    Dropping a motherboard into the unit is effortless - line up two holes to the appropriate retention posts and you're done. You can see one of the posts above.

Videocard In

IDE Wired

Optical Devices

    When initially trying to install the video card I encountered significant difficulty. The card would not line up properly to slide into the AGP slot. Mindless finagling with it for a moment found the source of my troubles:  the VGA retention bolt on the back of the mounting plate of the video card. The retention bolt, for video cables, is closer to the end of the bracket than most, and this interferes with the PCI/AGP support brace.

   After realizing this issue, it was no trouble at all to adjust my technique to accommodate the obstruction and I do not think this would be an issue for most users with better designed video cards.

   The HDPE material is somewhat slippery and this was quite noticeable when placing optical devices and the power supply on the top shelf. I especially noticed the power supply moving around when I tried to route power cables to various components.

   I did not mount the adhesive squares to the top deck for the review but am sure that that would alleviate the problem and would definitely recommend doing so.

   The ATX Control Kit worked quite well except for the previously mentioned, conflicting pinout issue. The leads of the switches and LEDs for the ATX controls are covered by heat shrink tubing that has not been heat shrinked. The tubing has a small diameter so it is retained between the LEDs and switches but is still loose and does not FULLY cover the leads. I don't think this would be an issue in any real world application but it makes you look twice; if these had been crafted with a somewhat larger diameter heat shrink that would slide over the pin blocks and then shrunk, they would look much better.