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Access to the inner workings of the
Luxor Pyramid can be had by removing one of the four side panels held in
place by two thumb screws on the bottom of each side panel.
The bottom of the case also features
feet like those found on higher end audio equipment. Designed to
reduce the transmission of vibration and, in this case, to lift the
frame up enough to allow for the cabling and air circulation.
Cooling duties for the bottom of the case are handled by two high speed
80 mm fans. Both of these fans blows air upwards through filters
to circulate hot air out through the top of the pyramid. Both fans
are powered by +12 Volt leads and are not thermally controlled.
The central cage is designed to hold the power supply.
The front panel is split in half. The
bottom half is removable to give access to the motherboard and
components.
The top half is hinged to provide
access to the drive bays and the top switches. The door is held
closed by a hidden latch near the top to provide the seamless side
appearance with the door closed. The top switched include the
traditional power and reset switches and a toggle for the top spotlight.
The Luxor design allows for two internal 3.5" hard drives, 2 external
5.25" bays and a single 3.5" external drive bay.
From the right side you can see one of
the two top mounted 80 mm exhaust fans, the sides of the external drive
bays and the removable motherboard tray. Like the bottom 80 mm
fans these two red LED lit fans are powered by the +12 Volt leads and do
not feature any control options.
Although aluminum can be difficult to
photograph, this picture gives a good look at the back of the case with
the motherboard tray installed.
The installation:
For this build I decided to migrate my
latest test build over to the Luxor. The build includes an AMD Athlon
AM2 5200+ with the
Ultra ChillTec cooler, 2 x EVGA 7800 GTX cards cooled by Artic
Cooling 5 series coolers and a
CoolIT PCI Cooling Booster, and a 2 x 2 GB kit of
OCZ Titanium Series DDR2-6400 mounted on an ABIT Fatal1ty AN9 32X
motherboard. Storage was provided by a 160 GB Maxtor SATA II drive and
a Lite-on 16x DVD burner and powered by the included Corsair HX620
Modular power supply featured in our
Silent PC review.
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Hardware |
Model |
|
Motherboard: |
ABIT Fatal1ty AN9 32X |
|
CPU |
AMD AM2 5200+ |
|
Memory |
2x 2 GB kit of OCZ Titanium
Series DDR2-6400 |
|
Graphics |
2 x EVGA 7800 GTX |
|
Power Supply |
Ultra XVS 700 W |
|
Drives |
160 GB Maxtor SATA II, 16X Lite-on
DVD Burner |
Due to the unique internal structure of the
Pyramid, I elected to follow the suggested installation as laid out
in the Users Guide. Based on my experiences, I highly suggest
you do the same.
The manual suggests installing the external drives
first and this proved to be the most straight forward part of the
installation. As the bottom 5.25" drive bay is the only one
visible through the windows, I elected to install a Matrix Orbital
MX610 display in the bottom slot. The bays are setup just like
traditional case bays and drives are easily installed using the
included hardware.
Next we removed the motherboard tray to gain
access to the hard drive mounts and the power supply area. The
tray is on rails and is held in place by the two screws shown at the
right above. Each screw is constructed of a thumb screw and a
stack of motherboard risers; clever! The motherboard tray
effectively splits the case into two separate compartments with
ventilation provided by open space along the sides.
The hard drives are mounted on a set of isolative
boards located on opposite sides of the power supply cage. The
mounting system shown here is removed for ease if installation.
With the hard drives in place the three silicon washers effectively
act as shock absorbers for the drive. The result is quieter
operation and extended hard drive life.
Here you can see the completed drive installation.
The separated drive mounting is just the first of many logistical
wiring challenges. fortunately for this build we went with a
single SATA drive and had no need to share the SATA power runs (or
pesky IDE data cables) between the drives. Behind the drive
you can get a good look at the power supply cage. The power
supply will mount right side up in the space shown. Since the
two bottom case fans blow directly up at the hard drive mounts the
drives get good ventilation. The unfortunate side effect is
that with two drives installed the air flow is partially blocked from reaching
the rest of the case leaving the natural convection and the top two
fans to do all the work.
Our Corsair HX620 mounted in snugly and there was
even an inch or two left over in the back to help hide cabling.
Over sized power supplies will probably not be an option here.
The power plug can be accessed from above or below the frame and
even our more centrally located Corsair location ended up working.
With both the drives and the power supply installed, now is a good
time to setup all of your cable runs. Once the motherboard
tray is installed all access to the bottom tray area is gone.
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