As shown in the accessories box, the North Momentum includes 16 M3 screws to attach the four 2.5-inch drives, eight screws to attach the motherboard to the factory-installed brackets, four power supply screws, an optional motherboard bracket, eight shoulder screws, and eight rubber grommets to mount the 3.5-inch cable guides. You’ll also find a fancy user manual, but it’s packed outside work
(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)
Now for the easy part! After installing our motherboard, we connected it to the front panel buttons and ports via power switch and split power LED cables, an HD Audio cable, and Gen 1 (19-pin) and Gen 2×2 USB cables. Because their signal cables are chained in series, the case’s three Momentum fans connect to a single motherboard fan header.
(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)
We aim for a test sequence that usually means mounting our cooler as far back as we can fit on the case’s top bracket so that its fans provide the greatest possible airflow over our motherboard’s CPU core voltage regulator. Although the North Momentum provides only 35mm of vertical clearance for our 54mm-thick heatsink, its 44mm of horizontal clearance allows almost everything to fit normally: Only the mirrored cover of our motherboard’s illuminated I/O connector sits outside the I/O screen and 45mm.
Our options were to either slide the cooler forward by around 30mm or push it inward. After first tightening it and finding that the top of the case didn’t accelerate, we moved it forward about 10mm, clamped it in, and found that the top clicked into place as expected. A slight compromise, but full transparency here!
(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)
While our setup issue seems to be specific to the mirrored plastic plate of our test motherboard, this problematic feature (see the cool “ROG”?) certainly looks nice. However, if you want to copy this setup, I recommend moving the heatsink slightly forward, even if it reduces the airflow over the voltage regulator a bit. As you’ll soon see, the voltage regulator is pretty cool.
(Credit: Thomas Soderstrom)
We mentioned earlier that the cable routing on the top of our motherboard was sparse and possibly inadequate, but we found one hole to be perfectly adequate… although not a perfect fit.
