Installation

The hard drives are slid in from the inside and screwed in tight, nothing special here. The optical drives can be either installed tool-less or by use of screws. The toolbox which comes with the Adamas includes clips for 2 optical drives to be installed this way.


Inside the Adamas box there is also descriptive manual (not present in the photo above)

Do note that the top 5.25” bay requires you screw the drive and not use the tool-less clips, as the drive needs to sit slightly further inside the system. The reason for this is the top bay’s custom front-plate designed especially for a DVD/CD drive.



The optical drive is installed from the front (after removing the front panel)



With the DVD drive and front panel in place you can open/close the tray easily, although the added “flap” makes quite a bit of noise:



I installed the Antec 650W power supply and found that there is plenty of space left, a longer PSU will fit without issue



The trickiest bit of the installation was the graphics card, the Geforce 8800 GTX is the longest retail VGA card to be released yet, it proves a challenge to fit it into mid tower cases, the Antec Nine Hunderd barely survived, hanging to give up some hard drive bays. The NZXT Adamas doesn’t do much better, in fact, it was a very narrow fit, we’re talking about less than a millimeter:





In the end I got it to fit but if you think about using SLI, I’d advise against it with this case, as you will be losing three out of four internal 3.5” spots. With a single 8800 GTX I lost 2 HDD spots.

Onto the performance tests ->