Thermaltake Element Q ITX Chassis - Closer Look and Installation

Inside Look:

While many people are just going to see the outside of the Element Q, it is still important to have a good layout - especially in such a small case.  If you are planning on putting in a graphics card, a hard drives, card reader and a full-size optical drive inside this unit, it better have some room in order to cram your gear.  It also better have some cable management options or you'll end up with the cables clogging up the little airflow that exists.  Let's take a quick peek inside before we install a system in this little box.

Case Open

Left Side Open

The case is pretty basic inside.  The PSU is a nice slim unit that can be removed easily for system installation.  I was able to install our gear inside with the PSU installed, but removed it for a better view.  As you can see there are standard 5.25" holes that allow for non-standard devices and should accommodate almost anything you want to drop in the top bay.  Although the specifications say that it can support two 3.5" devices you'll notice that there is only the 3.5" external bay available at first glance.

ITX PSU

While many companies may skimp on the PSU in an ITX chassis, Thermaltake keeps the quality high and provides a solid 200W unit that comes complete with a very quiet fan as well as a chrome fan grill that you'll never see unless you pull out the PSU.  I like this attention to detail.

System Installation:

While ITX systems are not the most powerful systems on the planet, we are using some pretty decent hardware in this build.  It certainly isn't earth shattering, but it is good enough for an eMachine, HTPC and then some.  We are using the ASRock A330ION motherboard (review coming soon), 4GB of DDR3 from Crucial, a Samsung 400GB SATA drive that is left over from a working pull.  Thrown in for our Optical Drive is a 16x Samsung DVDRW and rounding out the build is a multi-format card reader.  This loads up the case pretty full and the only thing we are lacking is a dedicated graphics card.  We had to leave this out as we currently only have dual-slot cards and the case will support a single-slot card.

Board Installed

Room In Front

On the next page, we'll continue with installation before we wrap up with some final thoughts.