Installation
The first thing you want to do is install the motherboard standoffs. The holes on the motherboard tray are labeled but there is no explanation to what the number and letters mean in the instruction manual, actually there is no motherboard installation at all in the manual. Since the power supply is installed on the top part of the case you are probably going to want to install it first, especially if you have a large CPU cooler.
Installing the hard drives is pretty simple, just slide them into place and screw them in. Your optical drives are just as easy. The front bezel covers easily come off so you can slide your optical drives in. Once you have your optical drive installed just screw it in to secure it.
Finally you can install the motherboard, which easily screws into the standoffs we installed earlier. Next just install your PCI cards and plug everything up.
We didn’t have any clearance issues when installing everything, but you might want to watch where you install your hard drives. Our X1950 Pro video card came pretty close to the hard drive. If you have a Crossfire or SLI machine you may have trouble getting everything to fit correctly.
Now I went to close up the case and put the side panel back on, but had a problem. The side panel would not close because the side panel fan was interfering with our CPU cooler. Now our CPU cooler is the ZEROtherm ZEN FZ120, which is a larger cooler. If you have any type of tower CPU cooler I would make sure that the side panel of the Automation would fit on the case before you buy it. We did not have a problem installing this system in the Thermaltake Speedo Advanced, which also has a side panel fan.
Since we were not able to install the side panel back on the case, I set it beside it to give you an idea of what it would look like when you have the case powered up. The side panel LED fan is quite bright and will light up the inside of your case for sure!
