After these initial observations it was time to get to work. For this build, I reused one of my old dual Athlon MP motherboards – A K7D Master 1, to be exact. There’s no particular reason for this selection other than the availability of spare parts I have. The ATX board had no problem fitting into the case and was easy to secure, though the case does not have an abundance of cable management options, so the inside is bound to be a little more constricted than some other designs in terms of airflow and available space.
To help things out a bit, I installed one of the SWiF 2’s (that’s Silent Whisper Fan 2) into the frontal intake area. The additional airflow it would provide was questionable though. With a fairly solid hard drive rack squarely behind the intake fan, I was left wondering how the airflow might be affected. Certainty the rack could have been slightly more perforated to provide a little more direct airflow to the rest of the case. It’s a small gripe, but not my only one concerning the hard drive rack.
While the card I selected (a relic, can you identify it? No cheating!) was able to easily fit within the chassis, I had to wonder if other, larger designs would have problems with the orientation of the hard drive rack. Upon measuring one of my other cards (a GTX 460); I determined that it would fit, but just barely. The problem here lies with the length of the cards and the placement/orientation of the hard drive rack.
