SilverStone Grandia GD05 Case
Dec 16th, 2010 | By SimonFrom the outside of the case we can see there is plenty of cooling potential but we don’t have a great indication of where the hard drives will be installed. Grabbing my trusty screw driver, I popped the top cover off. It’s time to go into the case!
To pull the optical drive cage out, there are four small screws to remove. Two are visible from the top of the case but two are tucked away on the side.
The cross brace needs to be removed in order for the motherboard to be installed, it’s held in by two screws at either end.
The last piece to remove is the hard drive cage over top of the power supply. The hard drive cage isn’t like your traditional cage, it’s pretty elaborate and depending on which screw holes you use you can install two 3.5″ drives, two 2.5″ drives or one of each. The screws to remove the cage are located along the edge, easy to access unlike the optical drive cage.
Now that the case is completely empty, it’s quite easy to drop in your motherboard and power supply. SilverStone states you can fit a heatsink as tall as 70mm if you’re using the optical drive, otherwise you can go as high as 120mm.
I placed a couple of the rubber tabs on top of the power supply. The instructions in the included pamphlet weren’t very clear but I would imagine that with these rubber tabs prevents the PSU from rattling against the case.
To further reduce vibration induced noise, the hard drives use rubber washers between the screw and cage. These little steps make a huge difference in reducing ambient noise. With an HTPC case, you don’t want your PC to be making more noise than the media you’re watching.
Even though the optical drive itself doesn’t have any vibration dampening grommets or washers, the cage itself does when mounted back onto the chassis. There’s a tiny rubber washer. It’s not nearly as effective as dampening any noise coming from the optical drive when it’s spinning away but something is better than nothing.
That sums everything up for what’s inside the GD05 and how to install your hardware. The last real step is putting the cross bracing back in, re-installing the drive cages if you already haven’t and drop the cover back on.
