Installation:

The inside of the Soprano is clean and very user friendly. The case is setup with room to spare and the design allows for superior air flow over other designs. Inside we see clean lines and ergonomic Tool-Free drive bay and PCI expansion slot devices. The Soprano does not have a removable mother-board tray, which doesn't effect mother-board installation in anyway. The spacious room of this mid-tower design allows us to install our motherboard with ease once we changed out the I/O plate.

Here I am removing the I/O plate that comes with the Soprano for our motherboard I/O plate to necessitate a perfect fit. Thermaltake makes this task easy with a removable I/O plate. This beats the other "knock out panel" designs that have to be punched out and fought with to remove the plate.

Now that I got the I/O plate in its new home, I added the mother-board nipples so we can go forward with the mother-board installation.

What appealed to me right off the bat was the fact that someone at Thermaltake decided the mother-board panel should have a screw-less retaining nipple and we think this is a nice touch. The mother-board panel has a retaining stud pre-installed to help secure the mother-board and we think this is a nice touch.

This aids in the installation of the mother-board, as it will help keep the mother-board firmly against the I/O plate. This in turn makes screwing the board down to specs, easy as can be - The center picture and "Red Arrows" to the lower right of that picture is what we are talking about. It's a simple stud that secures the board before you screw it down and aligns the screws with the nipples perfectly.

Now that the mainboard is installed we can go on to the next part, the hard drives. So how does that work? Thermaltake calls this a Tool-Free HDD installation. But what is that about? Well just like it says, you can install the HDD without the use of any tools. This is done by a very nice design of HDD locking devices. You put them in the holes where the HDD is located and then you turn the screw.

The Soprano has four internal 3.5" bays that can be used to install the HDD's. You can slide the HDD into each bay and a separate mechanism will then be used to fasten it. Here you can see the holes are not what you would expect.

These locking devices are easy to use and very handy. You only need one to secure a device in place. Thus, the locking device is known as a retention mechanism in that once you twist the key in the lock position and the device is held in place by tension. Line up the holes, firmly press and lock the device. Simple!

In this shot you can see the locking device installed and locked in place. This HDD is not going anywhere! How hard is that? Just slide in a HDD, put the locking device in place of the screw mounts, press and lock... It doesn't get any easier.

Everything is going smooth, with the HDD in place we can step back and access the progression. Now I installed the power supply unit and on this chassis, you have to install the PSU from inside the case. This is a nice design that does not need a bracket system for the PSU on chassis that require external installation. The Thermaltake design on this chassis is really clean and neat while providing maximum space for efficient and easily hardware installation.

For best results the power supply should be installed prior to installing the motherboard. This will ensure that you do not damage the components or other devices within the general area.