Getting your kit into the Dragon Rider is mostly trouble-free. There was one difficulty with getting a tall tower style CPU cooler into the case with the 220mm side fan attached but we will discuss this later on in this section.
As you can see from the below picture, there is lots of space inside the Dragon Rider due to it being able to cater for e-ATX (extended ATX) motherboards. It actually makes my ASUS M4A89TD PRO look rather small! arranging cables inside the case is very easy thanks to the contours of the side panel behind the motherboard tray.
Installation complete
Bundled with the Dragon Rider is an accessories kit that includes screws, grip ties, e-atx cable extenders and a very informative instructions manual showing you all of the features and how to install your kit into the Dragon Rider.
Items bundled with the Dragon Rider
Installing devices such as 3.5" HDDs inside the Dragon Rider is very easy. All you have to do is attach the provided brackets and slide into a bay of your choice. The brackets are rubberized, thus providing good anti-vibration characteristics.
Tool-less installation for devices
Due to the room inside the Dragon Rider there are no problems getting graphics cards to fit. Installed within the case we have the NVIDIA GTX 480 which is 10.5". There you can see at least 2 inches additional clearance between the card and the HDD cage.
The Dragon Rider can accommodate all graphics cards currently on the market
Behind the motherboard tray we have just 1.5 cm to play with. Remember though, the side panel behind the motherboard tray has a concaved design, so thicker cables like the 24-pin ATX power can be fed around the back without any troubles at all.
2 cm clearance behind the motherboard tray
The only difficulty came when I tried to secure the side panel onto the case. Installed within the case is the Noctua NH-U12P CPU cooler which stands tall at 158mm. Sadly, whilst the side panel does fit in place after some encouragement the 220fan touches the top of the heatpipes on the CPU cooler, thus preventing it from spinning. So with this obstruction present I had to remove the 220mm fan which required the removal of 4 screws and an additional 2 screws for the switch which would control the LEDs on this large fan.
So be aware, if you have a CPU cooler that is over 150mm tall then you won't be able to have the 220mm fan attached to the side panel.
Some tall CPU coolers obstruct the 220mm side panel fan
