Installation
Hardware installation in the GT1 is actually pretty easy. First let’s start out with our hardware which includes an Intel Core i7-2500K, Gigabyte Z77X-UD4H, Sapphire Radeon HD 6950, OCZ Vertex 4 SSD, Seatage 1TB hard drive, OCZ Fatal1ty 1000W power supply and a ASUS Blu-ray drive (not pictured). Of course motherboard installation is first so make sure you install your I/O shield then go ahead and install your motherboard. There is more than enough room inside to work with. Also since there is no CPU power cable hole you may want to install your CPU power cable or cable extension now.
Optical drive installation is easy. Since the front bezel covers have the easy release latches they are easy to remove. Go ahead and remove the one where you drive is going to go and slide it in. Make sure you remove the plastic locking piece on the inside of the case. Once you have your drive in all the way go ahead and use the plastic locking piece to hold the drive in place. I did notice that if you only have a single drive installed it does sort of look weird as the bezel covers extrude out further than the drive does.
Hard drive installation is next and we will be installing both of our drives in the trays. 3.5-inch hard drive installation is completely tool-less, so you just slide the drive in and make sure the pins go into the holes on your hard drive. When it comes to 2.5-inch hard drive installation you need to use the included screws. Once you have your drives secure you simply slide them back into the cages.
The power supply easily slides right into the bottom of the case. Now it is time to route of our cables. Most of the cables can actually be routed behind the back of the case, but not behind the motherboard. They need to be routed to the far side where your hard drives are. I was able to do this pretty easily actually and without any cable ties. Also while we are taking a look at the backside of the case we can see the CPU cutout is definitely large enough for us to take our CPU cooler off without having to remove the motherboard from the case.
Closing the backside of the case up you can see how things look on the important side of the case. We have installed our video card and have done the rest of the cable routing. As you can see we had to route our CPU power cable behind the video card, which was not a huge deal really. There is some cable mess in the front because of our longer PCI Express power cables. All in all installation went very well and I did not run into any major issues.
Now just put the side panel on and we are ready to power the system on. The red LED fan is really not that bright at all so if you wanted to light up the inside of the case you may want to get a LED strip or something like that. The blue LED accents on the front of the case are pretty cool.
