Date: September 13th, 2010
Article by: Joe Anderson (Hardware Reviewer)
Edited By: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by: Lian Li
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PRODUCT ASSEMBLY AND INSTALLATION (cont'd)
From the rear of the Pitstop you can see the PSU mount, motherboard cutout for CPU swaps, the 2.5-inch drive brackets and expansion card bracket. The top handle, mobo tray and PSU bracket are secured with thumbscrews to facilitate hardware swaps and the eight expansion bays also feature thumbscrews.
Lian Li offers a couple of other options for the Pitstop. The fan bracket will accept two 120mm or 140mm case fans and the trestle attaches to the rear of the mobo tray to add some much needed stability to the chassis. The fan bracket is available online for around $25, but I'm unable to find the trestle available for sale at this time.
Now, let's see how installation goes.
For this review, Mr. Bones and I have chosen the following components:
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MSI DKA790GX Platinum motherboard
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AMD Phenom 9950 BLACK EDITION Agena 2.6GHz (@ 3.0 GHz) 140W CPU OEM cooler
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Thermaltake Toughpower XT 775W PSU
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OCZ 2GB (2 x 1GB) OCZ2F10662GK RAM
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EVGA 8800 GTS 640MB graphics card OEM cooler
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Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 300 GB hard drive
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Samsung SH-S203N DVD writer
The hard drive cage is removable from the chassis and features rubber mounts and shoulder thumbscrews. The optical drives are mounted with screws in the conventional manner, but if you choose to use two opticals, getting screws in both sides of the drives is problematic and requires either the drives to be installed during assembly, or extensive disassembly.
When installing the motherboard, I had a minor interference issue with the audio jacks. The gray jack is in contact with the expansion bracket and may be unusable, depending on the plug design.
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