A closer look
The midi-tower steel chassis is fronted by pseudo-aluminium mesh that certainly gives off a more expensive feel. The power button dominates the central section and is backlit by a bright blue LED that remains on at all times.
There are two 5.25in bays free, so you could add additional optical drives or, should storage be your priority, a couple of hard drives using appropriate 3.5in>5.25in kits. The integrated card-reader covers the main formats and provides a third front-mounted USB port.
What was missing from the front of our particular sample, though, was an intake fan.
Turning the case around, its purple-coloured FSP Epsilon 700W power supply is immediately recognisable - and it's a quality PSU that has ample capacity to run another GeForce 8800 GTS 640 card and still remain whisper-quiet.
A single 120mm exhaust fan is the only concession made for cooling. It spins slowly and helps drive out the heat produced by the quad-core Q6600 processor.
The GeForce 8800 GTS 640 is positioned below the ASUS SupremeFX riser card and above a couple of fly-brackets that provide an additional FireWire400 port and a WiFi aerial. This arrangement is sound, because adding an SLI-forming GeForce card at a later date would require the use of the bottom-most two PCI slots.
It's becoming rarer to see a chassis that requires the use of a screwdriver to access the internals. Here, though, you have to remove two screws and unclip a couple of holding pads.
The holding pads line up with chassis-stamped holes, so simply remove and pull the side panel away. Note, too, that the side fan grill lacks an internal fan.
You can clearly see the ducting that's pre-installed in this chassis. The aforementioned Raptor X hard disk sits in the bottom cage and you can add two further drives in this section - there are plenty of SATA ports spare on the motherboard.
The cabling is reasonably tidy for small-ish chassis but it may become awkward as you add more devices. The drives are mounted in quick-release fashion on the left-hand side but screwed in on the right-hand side - which is rather self-defeating.
PC Specialist clearly believes that ye olde Intel reference heatsink is good enough to keep the 105W Q6600 cool under load. We noticed no fan-pitch modulation when running from idle through to full load. Indeed, the entire system remains pretty quiet irrespective of its power state. ASUS' PC Probe 2 software reported a maximum CPU of just 53°C - seemingly a little low.
Summary
A well-integrated system that had no build-quality foibles on our sample. Given a choice, we'd probably opt for a slightly larger, lighter aluminium chassis - it would make building and expansion somewhat simpler.
