A peek inside
The FSP 700W PSU is mounted at the very top, as usual, and an exhaust 120mm fan dominates the centre - the only fan besides the obligatory CPU and graphics card's.
Motherboard orientation requires the primary graphics card to be mounted a fair way down the slots, so should you wish to install another dual-slot-taking card, the Creative soundcard would need to be repositioned nearer the top - just something to be aware about.
The I/O section carries four USB2.0 ports, a single FireWire socket, motherboard audio - which is supplanted by the Creative card - and various legacy ports. PC Specialist makes the most out of FireWire by ensuring that a fly-bracket carries the other port, located right at the bottom, which can be irksome to get to.
Cabling is tidy enough but not exemplary. The steel innards make it look like a budget offering rather than a £1,349 machine, yet how many will really look inside, so it's more of a personal observation.
Expansion-wise, there are three spare 3.5in and three 5.25in bays. That's why we'd have preferred an 80mm intake fan to be pre-installed at the bottom, keeping the hard drives cool and extending their longevity.
Opening her up, an ASUS Silent Knight cooler claims ownership of the middle section. The motherboard's chipset can be cooled by a supplied fan, but the Q260GTX does without, putting emphasis on near-silent running over fans-o'-fury cooling.
Underneath the ASUS cooler sits the 45nm, quad-core Intel Q9450 CPU, running off a native 1,333MHz FSB. The motherboard supports all 1,333MHz LGA775 processors, and the upgrade path is open up to a 3GHz QX9650. Beware, however, that Intel will be launching its much-vaunted Nehalem architecture this autumn and it won't fit into the socket.
4GiB of DDR2-800 memory makes perfect sense if running Vista. A couple of Corsair sticks are used and can be further expanded to scale with the 64-bit operating system.
The 750GiB Western Digital drive is partitioned into a single volume. Seeing it on other machines, we'd have liked a second partition, perhaps 20GiB in size, which held the recovery software and factory-shipped state - it would be quicker to reload should things go awry.
The big-ass ASUS Silent Knight cooler in its voluminous copper glory. If given carte blanche, we'd have preferred some GPU-directed cooling, really.
ASUS is also the vendor for the GeForce GTX 260 that ships with reference clocks of 738MHz core, 1,242MHz shader, and 2,000MHz memory. The vendor doesn't really matter because the board is based entirely on the reference design.
Summary
The system is hardware-configured in a 'make do' state. Everything works, and it's quiet when running in both idle and load modes. Perhaps the enthusiast in us wants to see more attention paid to cooling; the fan-mounts are already in place.
