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The first thing you notice when starting building a system inside the SilverStone LUCID LD03-AF is the amount of space you have at your disposal, with access available from three sides of the case being an advantage. Installing the mini-ITX motherboard is a simple task, because of all this space there is plenty of room to manoeuvre the board into position easily.
Choosing the right CPU cooler for the system wasn’t too difficult since the LD03-AF can support up to 190mm tall coolers. We played it safe and went with the be quiet! Pure Rock 2 which is 155mm tall. The Pure Rock 2 fit inside the case with space to spare so we could easily have got away with fitting a bigger cooler, however, the Pure Rock 2 left us some room to play with if space became limited once additional components were installed.
According to the SilverStone tech specs of the LUCID LD03-AF, up to a 309mm graphics card installation is supported. We test fitted an Aorus RX 5700 XT card that measures approximately 300mm in length but it was a little tight for our liking and may have made it difficult to manoeuvre the card into position with other components installed.
In the end, we opted for a reference Nvidia RTX 2060 which is approximately 250mm long. This was a breeze to install, it left a healthy gap at the rear of the card to plug in the PCIe power cable and matched the aesthetics of the CPU cooler, so it didn’t look out of place.
One area of the case that I was concerned about prior to the installation was cable management, specifically the front panel connectors. However, the way the front panel cables were routed from the factory worked perfectly with the ASRock B550 Phantom Gaming-ITX/AX motherboard. All that was needed to manage these cables was to push them back under the motherboard tray a little to hide them away.
Power supply installation isn’t too difficult either, a bracket situated at the bottom of the case is removable and then fixed to the power supply before fitting back into the chassis. Manoeuvring the power supply back into position is a little tight with a motherboard installed but not too difficult.
There aren’t any cable management features of the case when it comes to the power cables, however, the power supply is located close to the other components of the system, so to manage the cables and make the system look neat means bundling the excess cable up and leaving it in the space behind the power supply, it's not the perfect solution but it doesn’t look too unsightly.
Overall, I was reasonably impressed with the layout and overall space inside the case. I was expecting things to get a little awkward due to the small form factor but surprisingly this wasn’t an issue. Building a system inside the SilverStone LUCID LD03-AF was quite enjoyable and for my first attempt at a mini-ITX build, I was very happy with the end result.
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