Anyone who’s been involved with PC building and modding for any length of time has seen their share of oddities when it comes to PC cases. These are the first thing people see after all, and as such they were some of the fist things to start taking different forms as the industry evolved. It was and still is a dynamic market, and as the designers and PR people put out products that they think we the consumer will appreciate and spend our money on, there inevitably come along some examples that are… out of the ordinary.
Assembly:
When I first started to put the test system into the Steam Castle I ran into a problem almost immediately. None of the three power supplies that I have available to me would fit. Looking closer at the specifications on the Steam Castle, it states a length limit of 160mm. Turns out they were serious. When I emailed Deepcool about the dilemma they offered to send one of their power supplies that was within the design limits of the case. They also sent a couple of other pieces to test out in the case to see how they fit and how easy they were to work with. While this isn’t a review on these pieces, I do want to give a quick look at each of them, as each has its own points and each will be installed in the case being tested.
PSU: DQ750 Quanta modular. This is a good-looking unit, with an interesting pebbled finish. More importantly, it comes with flat modular cables and it’s 160mm long. Putting out 62 amps in a single 12-volt rail, it should be more than enough for whatever system we can squeeze into the Steam Castle.
APU cooler: Maelstrom 240 closed-loop liquid cooling system. While very similar to most all-in-one systems on the market today, the Maelstron 240 comes with two of Deepcool’s better-looking 120mm fans, and the Deepcool logo is illuminated from within by a pulsating white LED. I was glad to see this in the care package from Deepcool, as I was interested to see how well it fits in this small chassis. I was pleasantly surprised to find a 4-way PWM fan hub included with the Maelstrom also.
VGA cooler: Dracula 7970. I had mentioned to the folks at Deepcool previously that I had planned to use a Sapphire HD7970 video card in this build, as I wanted to test its usability with a larger card, so they included the Dracula 7970 cooler as well. This is excellent, since this cooler is absolutely huge, and will be an even better test of the case and installation potential. Since the Dracula doesn’t come with any fans they also sent some of their UF120R 120mm fans. I’ve used these before and have been thoroughly impressed. These fans are heavy, quiet and move quite a bit of air.
Ok, back to the case at hand. For the initial test build the following components were used:
ASRock 960GC-GS FX micro-ATX motherboardAMD Phenom II 1100T CPU2 x 4GB Corsair Dominator DDR3 RAMDeepcool Lucifer CPU coolerCorsair Neutron 120GB SSDDeepcool DQ750 Quanta 750 PSU
In the first build, all of the drive bays were left in place to see how the system would work out with these two huge air coolers installed.
The Lucifer was mounted to the motherboard outside the case by necessity.
Happily the assembly slid right in, even with the upper internal bays in place.
The PSU slid neatly into place, though all of the optional cables that would be needed had to be connected first and pulled through when it was installed. There is no room between the front of the PSU and the lower drive cage for connecting or maneuvering cables.
I was even able to install the 7970 card with the enormous Dracula cooler on it.
As mentioned, the Dracula does not come with any fans. It does come with a very sturdy extruded aluminum fan mounting bracket that allows tremendous flexibility in fan choice and mounting options. I can think of several times that a bracket like this would have come in *very* handy.
Unfortunately, there was not enough room between the outer edge of the Dracula and the side panel to mount the fans. Time to move to plan B.
After removing the video card, motherboard and both of the upper drive bays, I pulled off the Lucifer cooler and installed the pump/block of the Maelstrom and reinstalled the motherboard. Installation was as simple as I had hoped, though one of the tubing elbows did get in the way of one of the mounting nuts, requiring the use of a small screwdriver to tighten it up. With the block installed I attempted to mount the radiator with the tubing end toward the front of the case. Unfortunately the small extension on that end of the radiator didn’t allow the mounting holes to line up. Turning the radiator around solved the mounting issue and the tubing actually looks better like this I think. I have to say I like the red striped on the fans also.
Having gotten the gigantic air cooler out of the way, I remounted the fans onto the Dracula fan bracket horizontally so they would clear the side panel.
It worked, mostly. I was only able to use a single fan, as the rear fan hit the tubing on the radiator.
In the end it all went together very well, though I was lucky not to have many cables to deal with. The 4-port PWN fan hub provided with the Maelstrom was a life-saver, as it allowed me to tie back the brightly-colored 3-pin fan cables that came with the Steam Castle, and the motherboard’s lack of a USB 3.0 header kept me from having to route that thick cable onto the side of the board closest to the window. While I’m sure there is room enough to get the job done well, I’m glad I didn’t have to do it. Overall, for having such a small area, the Steam Castle is fairly easy to work with. As I mentioned, it could be much worse depending on your hardware, but with the empty space to the right of the lower drive cage, cable management is possible.
