Earlier this week the last of the hardware I ordered arrived, so I could finally assemble the whole system.
Contrary to my expectations the CPU did not come with a fan (which was just as well, as I already had two), but with a lot of packaging instead. Someone at Intel should think about cutting down on all that plastic just to ship a tiny piece of silicon.
Speaking of silicon, contrary to almost all other current x86 CPUs the Core2Duo Mobile processors do not have a metal cap to protect the die, but the die instead sits rather unprotected on top (similar to the Athlon XP and Pentium 3 processors). This makes attaching a fan an interesting experience, because it is quite easy to damage the die while doing this.
Coolermaster is obviously aware of this, the contact side of the fan contains a foam spacer which surrounds the die when the cooler is placed on the CPU and which is supposed to prevent tilting. The cooler is then fastened to a mounting plate sitting on the bottom of the board using some spring screws. This works insofar as I was able to mount this without damaging the die.
Getting all this into the case is a bit tricky but manageable, as the mainboad tray can be pulled out from the case. The case has qute an assortment of LEDs and switches, unfortunately not all of these have corresponding connectors on the board (the two LAN-LEDs, the ERROR LED, the Mute switch and the intrusion detection switch). The SATA cables are numbered which makes it easy to plug them into the right connector, so the mainboards view of drive numbering lines up with the numbers on the case.
After putting all this together I switched the system on for the first time. All went well and the BIOS came up. The system is not exactly quiet, but I find the noise far more bearable than the Thecus one, mainly because most of the noise is airflow, and not the droning of the fans. The noise level is constant, too, so far I have not heard the case fans increase speed.
Next up: installing software