The Dead Space Society

The CPU comes with the factory cooling, which should be adequate with the 120mm exhaust fan and outside air tube for the CPU fan that comes with the case.

Personally, I prefer Corsair (that'€™s what I run in my system), but I was basing my design from the Anandtech entry-level gamers system from their Gaming Buyer's Guide. They recommended Mushkin for their system, so I chose that. I was trying to keep price down, and I am curious to see how well this memory holds up.

Yes, the DVD burner is the NEC Dual Layer one at NewEgg.

Everything but the video card I got from NewEgg. They were out of stock on that vid card, so I bought it at ZipZoomFly.

My labor is $96. It takes a little less than two hours to completely assemble (correctly), and then an hour, off and on, monitoring the OS install. I charge $32 and hour, it is a nice binary progression, so it makes it easy to scale charges in quarter hours. It is cheaper than what the big stores in town charge, but not so little as to make it a waste of my time.

Without labor it would be $917. Also, I was basing my build off the AnandTech base gaming system, which had a slower processor and only 512 MB memory. The customer wanted a faster CPU and more memory.

AnandTech has it's own price watch engine, so go to the Anandtech: Gaming Buyer's Guide and use the links provided in the article. They show up at the top of the article in the article header, and at the end in the Component Summary.

This next picture is kind of blurry, but hopefully you can see it well enough to understand what I am pointing out.
This case has screw-less side panels, on both sides. This is nice – even my case has screws on the right side. The problem is that in stead of a hefty latch like Antec or CheifTech use, it is these flimsy plastic sliding things. If you had to get in and out of your case often, I doubt these would hold up very long.

The next feature of this case that I was impressed with is this cable holder near the PSU. It is covered with rubber tubing, so you know your wires are not going to get damaged, and it make a nice place to route everything to keep it out of the way. You will see that better in a later shot.

Here is one feature for which there is no doubt. The exhaust fan in the rear of the case is a 120 mm fan. This will offer better air circulation with less noise than the standard 80mm fan. The only thing that needs to be done is connect it to a setup that allows you to control the speed. Since I am trying to keep the customer’s cost down, they are not getting a fan control panel for this. Hopefully, I can connect it to the Antec PSU they have in their older computer (it is overkill in that one) in such a way that is it controlled by the “fan only” system that Antec has in that line of PSUs.

This shot is a bit dark, so it may be hard to see.
Just like the rear exhaust, the front fan mount is setup to take a 80, 90, or 120mm fan. Mount another fan here and get excellent air flow.
I won’t be doing that since I do not think there will be a heat problem with this case one the Antec PSU is installed.

Edit: Forgot to mention that the front fan mounts so it can blow across the drives in the removable cage. If you are running some of those hot SCSI or SATA drives, this would be an excellent setup.

Here is a shot of the motherboard mounted in the case, with CPU and memory in place. This is a mid-tower case, but there seems to be quite a bit of room in there.

This last shot is of everything put together and running. It is hard to see in this shot, but that blue light on the front is pretty bright.
I think it took longer for XP to format the drive and install than it did to put all the hardware together.
This case is half an inch longer than my Antec case, but also half an inch less wide, while they are the same height. However, this Athenatech seems to have a bit more room in it than my Antec case. It also comes with a 120 mm fan, and mounting holes for another 120 mm fan in the front. The CPU duct and plastic screw-less drive mounting system are of questionable value, and the cheap plastic side panel release clips are certainly out of place in such a nice design, while the finish on the outside is about average. For the price, however, it is not a bad case, as long as you can live with handling the side panel release carefully.

Okay, to answer someone’s obvious question, “Why is this not in the review section?” Well, if I had done it that way, I would not have been able to post pictures with the specific feature I was discussing. I may place this in the review section here soon, with the PR shots (which are better quality), but I wanted to be able to have a running commentary of my build of this system in this case.