Post Vacation - Getting back to it!

Ok so a quick recap -not much had been done the last few weeks as I was busy with work and then went on a brief vacation.  Now I'm back the build will continue, however I'll also be doing various things in between including a review of Rich Chomiczewski aka Spotswood's new tech station.  I'll also be doing a CPU waterblock round up which will include:

DT Sniper
DT 5Noz
EK Supremacy
EK Supreme HF
XSPC Raystorm
XSPC Rasa
MIPS Iceforce HF

Thanks to DT, EK and Indigo Xtreme for sponsoring the blocks and TIM, thanks to Rich for sponsoring the tech station which will be used as the test bench :D

So without further ado, let's get back to some pictures :D

The tech station arrived from Rich in a fairly small box:

However there was still plenty of room for packing:

The case comes "mostly" assembled, here's the motherboard tray:

that mounts above the base which includes mounts for DVD drives, HDs and SSDs:

Here's the rest of the frame:

And all the screws and accessories, interestingly Rich includes an allen driver, as well as an allen key, and a torx key also

The frame makes use of extruded aluminum with a pattern that makes it easy to use screws and bolts/nuts to easily customize the setup.  Here's one vertical strut getting slid onto the base:

There is then a hole allowing that screw to be tightened.  Before you know it all 4 are up:

You can then add some feet:

Then attach the PCI card support to the motherboard tray and then attach both to the frame:

Then the PSU can be attached with two small plates:

Although this is solid enough for benching (and the PSU does not move), a 4 screw mount would be more solid if you were moving the case as there is potential for the PSU to bend those small plates.  The hard drives, dvd and SSDs use small rubber grommets that get screwed into the base of each device:

You can then slide these on the same extruded frames which have pre drilled access holes to make it easy to swap them in and out:

More to come tomorrow!