I proceeded to install a Soyo KT333 Dragon Ultra Platinum motherboard into the case. This is where you begin to notice the practicality of the case. First I had to mount a power supply into the chassis. That’s a no-brainer. As it came time to mount the motherboard itself, I found myself missing a removable motherboard plate. The motherboard plate in the X500 is built-in, so you cannot remove it for extra room. This is a bit of an inconvenience, especially because the rear exhaust fan unit can get in the way of laying the board into the case. Being that I was forced to use plastic motherboard spacers on one side of the motherboard, you have to have enough room to slide the spacer into the hole on the mounting plate and move forward. With the exhaust fan in place, I simply didn’t have room and had to resort to just having the spacers sit on top of the mounting plate rather than being locked into place. A removable mounting plate would solve the whole problem.

When going to install the video card, I found that the slot covers were the type that were attached to the case via metal. You have to rip the piece out in order to use the slot. And after doing this, the slot covers which were provided were the type that are pressed into place. This is not a problem, but not my personal preference. It would be nice to see the case come with screw-in slot inserts only in place. No ripping of metal, and the screw-in covers are easier to manage.

All the drives simply screw into place. There are no drive rails, no removable drive chassis. The accessibility of the front-end of the drive bays could stand some improvement. Out of the box, the X500 has the metal slot covers removed for one 5.25″ bay. The others require more ripping of metal inserts out of the case. There are plastic case covers over each drive bay, but they are hard to get out because there is no way to get your finger in there. You cannot get at any of the cover clips from inside of the case and there are no finger-holes on the front to be able to get a grip. So you might need to be a bit creative to get them out. In my case, I installed a CD-ROM drive into the case and then accidently pushed the bay cover just below it inward. There is no way to phyically get at it and bring it flush again without again removing the CD-ROM to get finger access to it.

Once I had the PC built, it was time to close up the case. The side panels are attached pretty easily. One thing to keep an eye on is the left side panel with the mounted case fan. The case fan faces inward, and being that this mid-tower is on the smaller side as far as mid-towers go, you need to pay attention to cables and power cords inside the case getting into the case fan. If one has standard ribbon cables and a load of power cables, the inside will just be chaos, and you’ll need to push cables around in order to use the side case fan. What I did was use rounded drive cables to conserve space, and used tie-downs to fasten all the unused power leads down rather than having them flapping in the wind. Still using care to give the fan a wide berth, I got the side panel on it and the fan worked great.