Open Air PC

After: Antec Skeleton (installed Sunday 13 December 2009) Good review He makes a few other good points about a couple engineering misses in this initial model… e.g. must add your cards after!?! you slide in the tray…it’d be nice to think there will be a V2 someday. Honestly took me about 5 hours to set it all up… I went slow and methodical… nice thing was, everything fit and worked how I wanted upon first powerup. I think I like the new “Scythe Zipang 2” cooler I landed on… especially if it keeps up on the temps with only the big fan up top… haven’t had a chance to run a real “full crank” test to check temps yet… can’t wait to see what my top over clock is going to be now. There is more vertical clearance than I was anticipating (see photos below)… almost wonder if i could’ve gotten away with my existing vertical oriented cooler… but a horizontal form factor like this Zipang-2 definitely seems more in line with the big top down blower central to this design. No real change in the overall noise signature… still dead silent… I’m satisfied. It’s quite the beasts as far as desk footprint… I do really like being able to leave the motherboard flat. The only real downside for me is that previously I had full freedom for component placement such that everything was readily accessible from a preferred direction… once you go with “a box” of any kind you have to accept that certain things are going to be facing an undesirable direction because that’s how the industry has settled on a standard orientation for each part… so my feng shui is a little askew but otherwise it’s very nice that things like the iMON display now have  a proper home… And also it’s good for everything to finally be in a container so that once I do finally get my air compressor (that Sears has obviously bungled APO shipment and I never know if/when is actually going to arrive on this shore), I’ll be able to pick it up and take it outside to blow out all the dust. View Full Album

Before Works but you know, needs some “containment” :) Can’t help but mention some system highlights while here: Keep in mind, this is a 2008 Q2 build… I know we’ve got i7 based systems now to drool over at this point but many of the components would still be my absolute go-to’s on a new build tomorrow. SoundGraph’s iMON “VFD” (Vacuum Flourescent Display) products are slick…  they can be configured via client software to display just about anything on your system including RSS feeds, email, graphic equalizer, etc… they provide a nice big “party size” volume level knob… and last but not least it comes with an full blown Windows Media Remote (infrared)… all the usual buttons including a “thumb stick” mouse controller right on the remote… very nice for serious Media PC action from the couched position! :)   (Antec has a nice display of some SoundGraph products) Yep, the ASUS P5e3 Premium mobo is standing up on foam wine bottle corks… perfect height, grip and anti-vibe properties :)  Gotta love a mobo with at least 6 SATA RAID ports + 2 eSATA. I’m still diggin the Intel Q9450 quad core, 12MB L2 cache!!,  stock 2.66GHz runs great OC’d at 3.2GHz just on easy breezey air cooling Speaking of which, Noctua fans are the shnizzle snap zap (pictured on the CPU cooler)… (Self Stabilizing Oil pressure!!) “SSO” Bearings, Vortex Control Notches, designed at the friggin Austrian Institute for Heat-Transmission and Fan Technology!?! how could you not love these wonders of silent motion engineering. I love the sexy screw in, light up, active PFC, modular PSU… The KingWin “ABT-900MA1S” 900Watter was one of few I could find last year… hopefully this is a trend that sticks. Quality: I did have to return one after it completely died on me … this new one ran fine for nearly a year now but recently (my guess is) one of the rails probably went into marginal territory because a DVD burner and hard drive plugged into the same modular cable started acting real strange on me… powered but weird noises and inoperable… i was about to toss them in the garbage but couldn’t shake the weirdness of two components going bad at the same time … threw them both on a different modular port and they’ve been fine for a couple weeks… so quality might not be one of KingWin’s strong suits … and @ $260 bones for that one component, there’s absolutely no excuse :\