POWER SUPPLY NEXT? YUP
IT’S AN UNUSUAL STEP FOR US, but before we’ve even installed the memory or even the cooler, we decided to go with the power supply next. Now, this isn’t something we’d traditionally recommend you do this early on in a build, but hopefully, you’ll find out just why it’s so important to get this done and out of the way as soon as you can.
How the power supply actually installs in the chassis, however, is something of a mystery, unless you have read the manual beforehand. We’d typically expect a case to be intuitive enough through its design that we wouldn’t need to do that, hence we didn’t open up the manual at first.
Basically, there is a bracket above the motherboard where the power supply sits in place, from which you can route your cables. That then connects to a passthrough power cable which runs to the bottom of the chassis, where you’d plug your power lead into. However, on first inspection, installing the PSU in a traditional manner just looks insanely difficult, as there’s no space for a screwdriver in the back of the chassis. The screws that go into the rear of the power supply, are actually facing that rear ventilated area that your AIO is going to be installed in later. Unless you have a tiny, yet hefty screwdriver, it’s not going to happen, and even if you did, it’d be fiddly as heck.
What you need to do is remove the entire bracket from the chassis itself, and then install the power supply to that, outside of the case, before reinserting it and securing it back down in the Z5i again. There are five screws that secure the bracket in place, four of which point out towards the side of the case on the motherboard tray side (meaning easy access for our plucky screwdriver), and another one located on the opposite side, near the top of the chassis, in the domain of the GPU. Remove those, and the bracket can then be removed from the case allowing you to install your PSU without worry. Once that’s done, you then reinstall that back into the case, and you’re good to go.
Looking at the chassis and the lack of cable management options has prompted us to do all of this earlier. We know we’re going to be strapping cables to the frame like nobody’s business, and trying to route them as best we can. So front I/O cables, RGB, and PSU cables are going in next.
This is one of the odd things about this chassis and goes back to that point we mentioned earlier about visualizing how you think the system is going to be put together. We saw ahead of time that cable management was going to be a nightmare, and so it actively altered how we approached the build. Installing a PSU, threading all the cables through, and handling cable management is usually the final piece of the puzzle. However, in this case, it came pretty much immediately after the motherboard installation because of the situation with the internal cable management. Sad times.