NighthawkBNE

Here you can see with the drive cage installed and the fixed power leads bundled up with the SATA cables in one of the drive bays, for a reasonable sized case, it's starting to feel cramped in there. In particular you can see the USB 3 header on this motherboard is close to the front and the cable ends up running under one of the dividers on the drive caddy. Pretty tight fit and needed a bit of adjustment so it's not pulling on the cable connector. I'm not sure how possible it is to put an ATX board in this case with a decent Power Supply and a video card, still got that coming.... and still fill the HDD bays, I'm thinking not but we'll see. Fortunately for now I'll only need a few of them. One surprise with this case is that the 5.25" bay covers are actually hinged doors. I hadn't planned on installing an optical drive as I didn't want to ruin the front aesthetic, but just might put one in now.

Here you can see how much the case is filling up with the Power Supply now installed, also another pic showing just how tight the SATA connectors are on the pre-installed 120mm intake fans.

Ok so pushing onwards, I've done some cable management on the front panel connectors and fan wires and all that is looking a lot neater. I've also plugged the bottom 4 SATA cables in and they are tight, really tight, I'll upload some pics soon and show with and without the drive caddy in. Surprisingly the pocket in the front left corner of the case which is only the size of a 25mm thick 120mm case fan, was really useful particularly for the front panel connectors, USB 3 and HD Audio connectors. I'd read reviews saying it was all but useless, and while it's not huge it's certainly workable. Now, next was the power supply. Never used a Seasonic before and the packaging was awesome, 80 Plus, Gold rated, 5 year warranty, all as expected, except... it's listed as a modular power supply. I suppose at the price point I should have known but it's one of those 'semi-modular' power supplies, meaning the 24pin ATX and CPU power cables are hardwired. That's going to be interesting. Pics of the PS below.

Installed the CPU and cooler, it's the new wraith cooler, very chunky and pretty awesome for a stock cooler. Not completely sold on the clip on mounting system for the cooler, seems a little loose to me. As you can see in the picture below there's not a lot of room between the sata ports and the case fans that bring air in from the bottom of the case. It's a shame about the red/yellow/black wires on the case fans but for this build going to accept that and just focus on managing the cables as best I can. When the drive caddy goes back in, there'll be even less room in this case.

Sounds like a great build

Great looking build. Takes talent to build from scratch. Patience too. Can't wait to see this progress.

So, getting started on opening the case box, I'm definitely going to stuff this up as it's a unique product and I'm supposed to read the manual. Guess we'll see how wrong I get it. The motherboard standoffs for MATX are installed, had to add the extras for ATX. Unusually they were a tight fit and I had to use pliers to turn them in, usually I can just do it by hand. My only other comment on the case so far is I'm not exactly wrapped with the paint job, particularly on the top panel. Maybe it's meant to be like this? Not sure how well it's showing in my smart phone photo's but it's basically all dimpled. Given this is going to live in a home entertainment cabinet I'm not that worried about it, but I wouldn't want it sitting on a desk where you could see it. Images below.

Components in boxes ready for the start of the build. The SSD isn't there as I'm stripping that from another PC where it's not doing much right now.

I'm about to start building my first home theatre PC. I've built a lot of pc's over the years but this is a first for me. My first ever online build log as well. Let me start by saying I'm a long way from the standard of a lot of the builds you see here, while I'd love to build something truly awesome, that'll have to come in the future. Right now planning on a neat, clean functional build with what I think are some sensible components to create a media server running PLEX and at the same time perform some light gaming duties as and when required for those games that suit the big screen. Another first for me (well, since the days of 80x86 architecture anyway) this is an AMD build. I picked up an ASUS Ranger Crossblade motherboard running the AMD A88X chipset with the FM2+ platform. I chose this for 2 reasons, got the board really cheap, the CPU's are cheap (especially the non APU variety) and I don't need an i7 for this build and it has 8 SATA ports. I couldn't find an intel board for under about $400 that came with 8 SATA ports. Speaking of hardware this is the build: Case: Silverstone GD08 HTPC Case (room for up to 8 drives) Motherboard: ASUS Ranger Crossblade CPU: AMD Athlon 880k Black Edition 4.0/4.2 Ghz WiFi Card: ASUS PCE-AC56 Dual Band PCi-E Adapter RAM: GSKILL 8GB x 1600Mhz Graphics Card: ASUS Strix GTX 950 2GB SSD: Corsair 120GB SSD for OS HDD: 2 x HGST 4TB NAS Drives, 1 x 4TB WD RED Drive (only 12TB to start with.. :-)) Power Supply: Seasonic G-650W Modular Power supply OS: Windows 10 At this stage I'm going to see how I go with the cable management, if you've looked at this case at all, you'll know it's tight. If I'm not happy with it may well splash on some custom cables from cable mod to make life easier and keep the build neater. Will have some photos of components etc to post soon.