Installation
Before we get into installation let’s take a look at the system we will be installing. It is comprised of a DFI mATX motherboard, Palit 9800 GT, Tagan BZ Series 900W power supply, optical drive, 320GB hard drive, and 4GB of memory. One thing to note is that there is no install guide that comes with the case. Antec tells you to go to their site and download it. The first thing you want to do is locate the 2 large screws on the inside part of the front the case. You can loosen them so release the internal tray.
The tray slides out easily. The tray is actually on rails like you would see on a rack mount so they are very high quality. The tray actually slides out pretty far, according to the manual on Antec’s website you should be able to remove the tray from frame of the case with a release tab on the lower left side of the tray. This tab was nowhere to be found on our case and after messing around with the tray there was no real way to remove it from the case. I’m not sure if this is a revision in the case, but if it is, it should be mentioned in the manual on Antec’s site.
The actual top motherboard tray can be removed, but there really is no point to remove it since we are installing a small motherboard and routing cables should be pretty easy. Our mATX board easily fits in the case, but this case also supports normal ATX motherboards as well.
Next we install our power supply. To remove the power supply cage you pull up on the lever and it will come right out. Go ahead and screw your power supply in and put it right back in the case, it is that simple.
Next we have the optical drive, first you need to find the small bag marked “For 5.25” device”, which has 2 round, silver-headed screws. You need to install it on the top right hole in your optical drive or the bottom placement in the Skeleton. Once it is installed you can just slide your optical drive right it and the silver-headed screw will lock it into place.
The hard drives are just the same, except you install the screws that say “For HDD” and you install one on the left side of the drive and just slide it in. There are only 2 internal HDD slots, but Antec does include mounting hardware to install 4 more external hard drives, 2 on each side of the case.
Once you have all of your components installed you can go ahead and connect everything up. Managing all the cables and routing everything is very easy. When you slide the tray back into the frame you can secure your video card. For me installation took about 30 minutes, which isn’t that bad. There are a few concerns with this case though. If you have a large CPU cooler it might not fit in this case because of the center fan. Also as I said earlier we were unable to remove the tray completely from the case.
