Inside the KL-I915A
The top of the KL-I915A enclosure is one piece which encompasses both sides and the top. By removing the three thumb screws from the back, you can slide the enclosure back slightly and then lift it off to reveal the innards.

The first thing you see when removing the case cover is the motherboard itself. It's set down in the case, but not as far down as the motherboard on a Shuttle XPC. Because the drive bays sit below the motherboard, there's nothing to move out of the way to gain access to the motherboard itself. This makes installing RAM, changing processors, etc. a lot less claustrophobic than a typical Shuttle system.

The layout of the KL-I915A's motherboard is very clean. If you look closely, you can see that there are ribbon cables coming off the board on the right side which lead to the ports, etc. on the front face, but the connectors are perfectly placed and the cables perfectly sized so that they're completely out of your way at all times. Note also that the floppy, ATA/100 and SATA connectors face out the side of the system; the reason for this orientation will become clear shortly. The north and south bridge chips are passively cooled, which is always nice in a system that could be destined for your living room. You may have noticed that there are no power connectors in the above shot. That's because they're located on the underside of the board, close to the power supply.

There is one problem with the KL-I915A in this area that needs to be mentioned. In pre-production samples, a large capacitor jutted up from the board to the right (as pictured above) of the PCI-E slot. This meant that longer cards such as the GeForce 6800 GT wouldn't fit in the KL-I915A. Ironically, while this problem has been fixed in production boards, the end result is no better. The large footprint of the KL-I915A's CPU heatsink interferes with longer graphics cards (including the 6800 GT), making installation in the Kloss box impossible. Kloss has a list of recommended video cards available on their web site, but at the moment only a handful of cards (and by handful, I mean nine) are listed. These are mostly shorter cards, like Radeon X300 and X600 models. Hopefully Kloss will work to expand this list in the future, but until then, check your vendor's return policy carefully before ordering a video card for the KL-I915A.

Speaking of the CPU heatsink, here it is. The heatsink uses a heatpipe design, a 92mm fan, and a large plastic hood that helps it draw air from the hole in the top of the case. The hood is actually offset slightly from the hole, and falls a few millimeters short of the top of the case cover, but it's close enough to accomplish the intended goal of drawing fresh air into the system.

Here's a shot of the bottom of the heatsink, giving you a better view of the heatpipe area.

Now we move to some of the more innovative parts of the KL-I915A's design. Above, you can see a picture of the system from the left side. The angled drive connectors have a perfectly-sized cutout in the chassis, making them easily accessible. This is the sort of nifty thing you can do when you design a motherboard and enclosure together.

The really slick part of the design comes with the way the hard drive and optical drive mount, however. In the picture above, you'll see a small aluminum flap on the left side, an inch or two off the bottom of the case. The hard drive fits under this flap, lying across the back of the case. You'll also see an aluminum shelf of sorts on the right side of the picture. The external 3.5" bay is under this shelf, and the 5.25" drive rests on top of it.

Describing the locations of the drives, however, doesn't at all express the elegance with which the drives mount into the case. I'll try to explain it as best I can. To mount the hard drive, you'll install two screws into holes on one side of the bottom of the drive. These screws are included with the system and have a spacer so the head sits away from the drive's case. The bottom of the KL-I915A's enclosure has two slots; you place the drive in the bottom of the enclosure, then push it towards the back of the case, slotting the screw heads into the slots. Finally, by moving a plastic lever, you will close off the opening side of the slots, locking the drive into place.

The optical drive mount uses a flat piece of metal that mounts on the side of the drive and moves up and down. Special screws are once again installed on the bottom of the drive. These screws slide into slots on the bottom of the aluminum shelf shown above. Once the drive is in place, the flat piece on the side of the drive is swiveled down where it slides into another slot on the aluminum shelf, locking the drive into place.

Now that I've thoroughly confused you, here's the same shot as above, this time with the drives installed in the system.

This picture gives you a nice view of the flat metal piece I was talking about earlier. The screw opening on the right is slotted, allowing the piece to pivot around the left screw. On the left side of the picture, you can see the installed hard drive. The side with the power and data connectors is facing away from the camera in this photo.