Thermaltake Element Q ITX Chassis - Installation Continued

Installation Continued:

Installation actually went pretty smoothly in the Element Q and we actually installed as much additional hardware inside this little case as many people do in a build with a mid-tower.  We used a single hard drive in order to use a card reader in the front of the case.  If you're concerned about amount of storage, you can always pick up a 2TB drive and you should be good to go.  The HDD gets mounted standing vertically beside the optical drive next to the RAM.  It is kind of an odd situation, but it works just fine.

HDD Rails

RAM Spacing

As I previously mentioned, the optical drive uses standard installation whole and requires screws.  The same is true for front 3.5" devices as well.  This is most easily done if you install the 3.5" device first before you completely hide the bay with the 5.25" device.  There is quite a bit of room below the 3.5" bay to stuff extra cables and you should be able to keep the main area of the case and motherboard fairly free of cables.  

Installed Close

Side Open Installed

There is adequate room for the motherboard and components on the ASRock A330ION motherboard in this case.  You can see in the picture below that there is a bit of room between the ION chipset and the PSU.  There isn't a lot of extra room in this case, but it is designed primarily for Atom & ION based systems and this should work out well.  If you are planning on putting an LGA775 or more powerful system in this case, make sure that you've got room.  It should work out, but I can't guarantee compatibility.

On the last page we'll wrap things up with a conclusion and a few pictures of the end result.