| NZXT Adamas Premium Aluminum Chassis
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Installation:
For the installation portion of this review, I installed these components into the NZXT Adamas case:
» Zippy (EMACS) 600W Power Supply
» AMD Opteron 148 processor
» DFI Lanparty NF4 SLI-DR motherboard
» 1024MB G.SKILL Extreme DDR (2 x 512MB) memory
» 3x Hitachi 80GB 7200 RPM SATA-II hard drives
» IcyDock MB722 series SATA Drive Enclosure
» Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB 7200 RPM SATA-I hard drive
» eVGA GeForce 7800 GT CO 256MB GDDR3 PCI-E
» Pioneer DL DVDRW
» D-Link Wireless G PCI
» Sound Blaster Audigy 2z Platinum sound card
Here is the final image of the inside of the case with an installed system up and running. If I did not have the two spare 5.25" bays to stuff wiring into, I have no idea what it would look like with the mess of wires. There are many things I do not like with a rather large system installed in the Adamas case. First, the hard drives would be much better suited with a 90 degree rotation. Even closing the gap between the cage and the 120mm fan would have been okay. The installed hard drives prevented access to screwing in the motherboard because they are so crammed together. (Luckily I do not have a second PCI-E card in SLI, because the wiring for the hard drives would have to be routed around the extra card). Second, since the motherboard area inside the Adamas measures 25cm wide and my motherboard size is 24cm, the edge of the board met up with the back of the 5.25" devices. You can see the IcyDock device (which is a little long anyways) sticking out about an inch, if it was in a lower bay it would interfere with the board.
If you did not notice the missing rear 120mm fan from the previous image, you can see it is not installed here. The reason why is because of the audio module board that sticks out from the DFI Lanparty motherboard. It would have fit if the fan area was inset instead of being flush with the back I/O panel. I also dislike the expansion slots. With tear off covers you might have to find something to cover unused slots in a new install. Even with them not torn off, they have a pretty large open area for dust to enter the case.
 
With the inside of the case behind us, here is the front with devices installed and the system powered up. In the top, behind the faceplate, is a DVD-RW drive. When testing the release button, it needed to be pushed way in for the real button on the drive to eject the tray. The IcyDock enclosure looks good installed in the 5.25" bay. The only LED on the case is located on front to indicate power and hard disk activity.
 
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