Installation detailed

With the removal motherboard tray installation is quite easy as long as you have the necessary hardware that fits. Bacata.net provided us with an Abit LG-95C and HuntKey 450W PSU; that PSU is quite short in depth which is important for this case.



This compact Abit motherboard features onboard video provided by the Intel GMA 950



Next up is the importance of the CPU cooler, as you are very limited in height most if not all tower coolers are out of the question, many third party coolers will simply not fit. We tried two Intel reference coolers.

The first is the very low profile one which you get with the new 45nm Core 2 Duo CPUs:



In the photo above you see that the cooler has a lot of clearing, also the OCZ Reaper DDR2 modules fit inside the case with a few mm to spare.

Next up is the second biggest reference cooler from Intel with copper core:



A tight fit, but the area above the CPU cooler is open for fresh air to be provided to the fan. If you want a cool and quiet system, make sure to select the correct components. As the small size of the Black Pearl case means that it will make a world of difference.

The hard drive rack is easily filled and accessible enough for the power and sata cables:



At the other side of the case there is room to guide the cables of the front I/O panel out of the way of the airflow path:



Install the PSU at the end when all other devices are inside the case as it will make access to the lower level much more difficult;



The depth of the PSU plays a vital role as the optical drive comes quite close, and cable routing will become more difficult.



With everything hooked up and using the onboard VGA there is quite a bit of room left inside the case, which will benefit component cooling a lot.



When we add a video card it will definitely be more cramped inside, a Geforce 7900 GT with custom Zalman VF900 cooling fits, with not much to spare:




Time to put the side panels back on and fire the system up ->