Installation

Upon opening the case, I was greeted by the ever-familiar sight of bundled wires, and a lot of them! It looked like everything major was there — power, front panel, USB, FireWire, and audio. Fortunately, there's no need to remove the front bezel of the case, so I shouldn't run into issues like ripping the cables from their mounts.



Also, it's noticeable that there is nothing next to the right of the optical drive cage, and this leaves enough space that I could potentially fit a high-end graphics card in to this case without any clearance issues. There is a spot for an 80mm fan in this area, and there is an 80mm fan mounted against the rear of the case.



I decided to install the motherboard first. Most of the standoffs are already in the case, so I had little work to do before screwing the motherboard in. The only issue I had with the motherboard is that the 24-pin power connector is directly under the optical drive, which may make for a difficult time when connecting the power.



Since the bottom of the case is not removable, GMC made both drive cages removable. This makes for an easy installation. If they weren't removable, we'd end up with only a single side of any drive I install being screwed in. Hello, vibrations? Let's start with the optical drive...

...and finish with the hard drive.



After securing the drives, I decided it was time to wire the system up. The front audio connector only supports AC'97, rather than the optional AC'97 or Intel HD Audio that many new cases offer. There are two separate USB connections, one for 2 USB ports in the form of a single block (oh so helpful =D) and a separate single connector for the iMON hardware.

Follow these connections with the front panel headers. There's nothing out of the ordinary here except the lack of a power button cable. Instead, GMC includes a 24-pin to 24-pin extension cable that has 2 leads that run to the front panel. This is so the iMON infrared port is able to power on the system, but the power button is also wired in this way.



Finish these connections with the SATA and PATA cables for the system drives, then we'll finalize installation with the Micro ATX power supply. Micro ATX power supplies take up significantally less space than their ATX brethren, but are able to provide far less power. For the time being, we'll be testing with a 200W power supply.



The end result is a little unsightly, but many of the cables should be able to be routed with a little work to neaten things up. Thankfully, there's plenty of space under the optical drive cage to hide some of the cables.



Finally, I installed our MSI GeForce 8500GT videocard. The AVC-M1 doesn't feature tool-less PCI slots, but I had no issues aligning the card with the case or fitting it to the motherboard.



Now let's look at how the case works now that everyone is installed.