Assembly

The assembly constitutes of two major steps. First you get the two shelves ready and then connect these together with the included stands.
We tried to follow the steps in the manual as much as possible to give you an idea as to what you will have to go through. First, the focus is placed on the bottom shelf and the four rubber feet. These are secured with screws which stick out the other side. This is by no means a mistake, but serves a pupose. The four pillars are secured on these screws later on. Placing the feet on the shelf actually concludes the work on the lower part of the Tech Station.


The upper shelf requires a bit more work. Each mainboard stand needs to be screwed in. There are a lot more than you may need and as you can see, the size of the shelf is large enough to hold eATX boards as well. There are two specific, plastic standoffs to further secure a mainboard on the shelf itself. The hard drive rails need to be installed on the underside of the upper shelf. This is done by securing four screws with spacers, creating a simple rail to slide the hard drive on. There is sufficient space for up to two hard drives.


There is a fifth screw with a standoff, which serves as a stop for the hard drives. With this, there is no way for a drive to fall out the other side by mistake. There are four right angle metal pieces included. These have a hole on each end. One to secure them to the upper shelf, the other to screw in the included 12 cm fan. This also concludes all the preperation of the two shelves.


The shelves are simply connected using the included stands. The next step is screwing in the two shorter parts on the upper shelf for the PCI bracket. The general shape is much like a normal case, with thumb screws to secure AGP, PCIe or PCI cards.


After finishing the assembly of the Top Deck Tech Station, I was left with a few spare parts. The reason for the additional fan screw can be explained. The fan can be secured by up to two screws. It will blow across the top and underside of the upper shelf in such a configuration. I chose to let the fan hanging down to blow across the underside of the shelf.