Thermaltake Spacecraft VF-I System Build

In this section we will build a system inside the Thermaltake Spacecraft VF-I case and report back our findings.

The Accessories look quite basic too. You get all the usual things like stand-offs and screws plus a few extra things like fan spacers/grommets, re-useable cable ties, long fan bolts (for front intake fan) and some plastic motherboard supports.

In the accessory package there were twelve screws that could be used to secure the motherboard but four of these were also purposed for securing the PSU as well, this left only eight of the usual nine screws for securing the motherboard into place. As you can see in the image above I pre-installed one of the plastic motherboard supports in one location of the motherboard where I know it will be very tight to secure a screw with the CPU cooler pre-installed. With this in place I know there won't be any flexing of the motherboard in this area VS having nothing there at all.

Beneath the ODD cage you will find a little pair of brackets for installing a 2.5" HDD/SSD. If it wasn't for me reading the manual I may have not noticed this or I may well have overlooked it in either case. The fit is very tight and I didn't need to use any screws to hold the drive in place, your mileage may vary.

Depending how resourceful or creative you are it is still possible to hide your cables out of the way round the back here. I cable tied the 24-pin cable to the spine of the motherboard tray as there were four pre-drilled holes and it made sense. My 8-pin CPU cable extension makes it easier to route the CPU cable without having to over stretch it etc. The very bottom motherboard tray cut-out is completely blocked by the PSU and therefore rendered useless.

With the aid of cable ties and creative planning we end up with a pretty tidy install. I had my doubts as to whether I would be able to pull it off but the Spacecraft VF-I case came through in the end. There is still room to spare which could be put to good use...

If you hadn't noticed earlier there are small mounting holes (highlighted by the red arrows) that allow you to install any 120.2 (240mm) watercooling radiator with 15mm fan spacing, which is most of today's current line-up. Thanks to the offset (70mm from the side panel) position of the mounting holes you get a lot of clearance inside the case to install a thick radiator.

That is close to 55mm clearance before I run into problems with my RAM, if it were low profile RAM I would have more clearance still. Sure the whole setup will overhang the motherboard but it is a clever way to get around the radiator mounting limitations of mid tower cases, the Fractal Arc Midi also has this radiator mount setup.

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