Disassembly

Even though the Banchetto comes almost fully assembled, it must be taken apart to install the PC components. With its tool-less modular design it can be taken apart very quickly and easily. First step is to remove the optional fan bracket. Out of the box this part is not installed. Two thumbscrews fix it to the motherboard tray.


Next you can remove the motherboard tray. It does take a bit of force but should lift off the top of the base pretty easily. Once the tray is removed you can see the two large cutouts which serve to aid in cable management as well as cooling of the components. The motherboard tray uses four rubber feet, just like the base of the case. The feet have a small hole in which the pegs from the base insert into, to join the two pieces together. It is recommended that you do not pick up the unit by holding the motherboard tray once the PC is installed.


To remove the hard disk bay two thumbscrews at the bottom must be removed and the unit will slide right out. The process is the same with the optical drive and power supply bays. Be careful to not scratch the acrylite when removing the bays as there is very little clearance and the edges on the aluminum are somewhat sharp.


For mounting the power supply, a simple aluminum bracket is used. Up to three 5.25 inch devices can be mounted in the included optical drive bay. Four 3.5 inch drives can be mounted in the hard drive bay, but there is no option to mount 2.5 inch drives such as SSDs, which have become very popular lately. Perhaps the next revision of the Banchetto will include this feature. All of these pieces are anodized 1.2 mm thick aluminum which looks nice and is more than capable of holding the amount of hardware you can fit in it.


On the bottom of the Banchetto are four rubber feet which serve as vibration dampeners. A few more features that might go overlooked are the water cooling hose pass-through holes which can aid in routing tubing to the CPU up top from the rad down below. While 1/2 inch tubing would not fit through the holes, 7/16 inch and 3/8 inch tubing which is more commonly used fits nicely. The radiator panel has a versatile mounting hole pattern that allows for use of radiators that use either 15 mm or 25 mm fan spacing. Microcool has also provided pass-through holes that allow for better routing of fan wiring. Taking a closer look at the motherboard tray you can see that it also provides for mounting of Micro ATX motherboards by relocating a few of the standoffs. There is also a thin laser cut slot in the rear of the tray that allows for the proper seating of the PCI brackets that pass through the tray.


If you do not plan to make use of water cooling you can stop here and begin installation of the PC components. Removing the rear radiator panel is quite simple as it is held in with only four thumbscrews. In our sample, these four were rather difficult to remove without a little help from a flat head screwdriver. This is most likely because the acrylite is still new and the holes are not worn in enough to allow your thumbs to do the job quite yet. As previously mentioned, the radiator panel also serves as a place to mount a water pump. The slits in this piece allow you to make use of many different pumps and placement is quite flexible as well. Now that the bench station has been almost completely disassembled you can see the inner structure that holds the top to the bottom of the unit. At this point the Banchetto is still very stable due to the strong aluminum that is used.