Hardware Assembly
Here we’ve attached a Gigabyte X99 SOC Force (E-ATX form factor):
You have two options for mounting your PSU (or PSUs!) Vertically like shown above, or horizontally as shown below:
While vertically secures the PSU in 3 spots, compared to just two when horizontal, we decided to go with horizontal in order to maximize our radiator space.
Today we’re setting up our bench with two 360 radiators!
We can say that without a doubt this was the most painless radiator installation we’ve ever had – and that’s saying something! We didn’t have to fiddle with anything while trying to line up the radiator, the fans, and holes to fit the bolt through. It was absolutely painless. We attached all 3 fans with their respective bolts – minus two on either end. From here we simply inserted the four square nuts, attached the four plates that allow the radiator to “float” and held up the radiator and screwed in the four bolts on the radiator side of the plate. Simple. The second bar from the bottom is adjustable in order to accommodate different sized radiators, or something else if you aren’t putting radiators in here!
Even after we mounted two radiators there was still plenty of space! We later added a second set of fans on each radiator so we could have a slick push/pull setup – because why not?
The bottom “sleds” on the left can be used to mount SSDs or really anything you choose. The best part about this case is that you aren’t limited in any way at all. Just because something is meant to do something, doesn’t mean it has to. You are free to change the case any way you’d like!
Instead of using the drive cage to mount HDDs we decided to mount a bay reservoir/pump combo unit instead. As you can see here, if you go this route you get enough space for about 4x 5.25” slots.
Our only major complaint that we had was there seemed to be a fair amount of extra space on the top of the bench that we weren’t quite sure what to do with initially. Later down the road though we ended up mounting an additional 240mm radiator up here!
So there you are folks. The bench is now holding a complete water cooling system, 1600w PSU, and an X99 E-ATX motherboard – with space to spare!
We used a different motherboard for the following build but we wanted to give you a general idea of how one could use this bench as a full on gaming PC as well.
