Installation continued

Installation of the motherboard was straight forward, place the stand offs on the motherboard tray then position the mobo correctly and screw tight in place. The HDD and CD slid easily into their desired position with the help of the drive rails. Everything was going smoothly until we tried to install the graphics card.

Since the Zirconium RT-101 is a mid tower case large graphics cards cause a compatibility problem; as you will see in the photo below, the 8800 GTX from NVIDIA is too long to fit correctly inside the case, the only way to fit this VGA card it to remove the lower hard drive bay.



As the 8800 GTX is a dual slot video card, the tool-less installation doesn’t work, you need to remove the plastic clips (takes 3 screws) in order to install the VGA card in the traditional fashion.



The photo above showcases our first test setup with the NVIDIA 8800 GTX, the hard drive was installed in the floppy drive location; not the ideal setup, but it works.

Realizing that not everybody will be using this case to pair up with the highest end VGA cards, we swapped the 8800 GTX with a more modest 7900 GT model. Length was no issue now and we installed the system as intended, using the tool-less PCI bracket holder and lower hard drive cage:



There was a lot of room available to hide the cables, a few zip-ties located here and there could streamline this procedure to improve airflow inside the case.

Onto our test setup ->