Installing a power supply unit is more difficult than installation of most other componenets. This is primarily because the wires of the top USB ports are located in the same area and partially obstruct the PSU.

Motherboard installation is quite simple and only requires alligning the motherboard with the proper holes depending on the form factor of the motherboard being installed. To make installation easier, a handy legend is printed on the chassis that tells which screws that should be used with the various motherboard formats.

In most cases, installation of PCI or PCI Express devices isn’t much of a problem. For the Soprano DX, installation is compltely tool-free, and a locking device hold cards in place.

The problem starts when we try to install a dual-slot video card solution that is more than 220 mm (22 cm or 8.661 in). In our case it is a GeForce 7950 GX2, but a Radeon X1900 video card also has relatively the same length. What happens after installation of the video cards is that the end of the cards touch the hard drives, which are located in the HDD cage. What this ends up doing is making it impossibe to connect several essential wires, including the PCIe 16x 6-pin power connector.

In the case of even longer video cards ( actually there is only the GeForce 8800GTX) it is necessary to remove the HDD cage completely. Instead, the hard disk must be installed in the 3.5 inch slot, originally designed for floppy disk readers or memory card readers. This is a problem, though, if you are using multiple hard drives as there are only two 3.5” drive bays.

In the end it is also particulary difficult to install a dual video card solution with the Thermaltake locking system.