Installing hard drives into the removable cages consists of inserting the drive and simply screwing it down. You can see here that there is indeed a slot for an 80mm cooling fan to be placed, although none are included. If you plan to load the chassis with hard drives, I would certainly recommend that you pick up a pair of fans to keep things cool.

As for the optical drive, you may need to actually place the assembly in the chassis to see exactly which screw holes to use on the cage. I had to move my drive as far forward as possible. Also, don't forget to remove the tray bezel on your drive, as you will need it removed in order to attach the included aluminum bezel which is held in place with sticky tape.


System specs:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+
Zalman Heatsink
2 GB OCZ Platinum PC-4000 EB DDR
DFI LanParty UT Nforce4 SLI-D
XFX 7300GT
Two Seagate 400 GB 7,200 RPM SATA 3.0 Drives in RAID 0
Western Digital 120 GB 7,200 RPM
780w OCZ ModXStream PSU
Creative X-Fi Sound Card
Hauppauge TV Tuner
Lite-On DVD Burner

I found it best to install the optical drive first, then hard drives, power supply and finally, the motherboard. I did run into one issue during installation, however. The VGA cable that extends out of the bottom expansion slot had to be moved, since this is where my sound card goes. My motherboard only has two standard PCI slots, one for my TV tuner and the other for the sound card. Unfortunately, this was not easily removable and I ended up having to bend the expansion slot to be able to slide the VGA cable through. Ultimately I ended up just hanging the VGA cable out through the I/O opening (I didn't use an I/O shield).

I could have probably spent a little more time with PSU cable management, but factoring in all of the front panel cables, it really is a little crowded inside with everything in place - definitely not as "pretty" as some mid-tower cases, but then again... its a HTPC case, nobody will be looking inside to give awards for tidiest case!

Continue ahead as we present our findings on the MonCaso 972 and wrap things up with a conclusion...