tHE gLORY AND THE sPLENDOR OF aDVANCED aLPHA tWO
This page is a
gallery of digital camera shots taken from multiple viewpoints around the
system. Hopefully, you can see the effort placed in making a system that
is not only incredibly capable (for the cost), but at the same time both,
tastefully stylish, as well as impressive in presence. My only gripe was
that the camera used (a Kodak EasyShare DX4900), requires the flash in order to
take useable images. The flash severely reduces the effect of the immense
red glow of all the red lit components combined.
In the future, I plan to learn a technique for taking images
in the dark with a real camera and film, and update this page with some truly
eye-opening images. Also, please excuse the very long download; I
personally felt that having the images any smaller and less detailed would not
do the system justice. I hope that you will agree.
Nexus NXP-201, Lite-On optical drive suite, floppy drive and quad red LED 92mm intake fan
The Thermaltake
XaserII actually comes with a Hardcano 7 unit built in at the top, but because
it only had a single fan control, and that channel could only handle a one fan
at a time, I needed something that could control all the fans in the system at
once, while not taking away from the look of the system (if not enhancing it!)
and still being easy to set up. While the many rheobus kits available on
the web would fit the bill, having to drill my faceplates is a pain, and none of
them look as clean as the Vantec NXP-201 unit in silver. Isn't it a
perfect match?
You may also notice that the floppy drive is wasting a 5.25"
drive bay; it was necessary because all six 3.5" bays are occupied by hard
drives, and in order to ensure sufficient cooling, I wanted at least an 80mm fan
blowing over all of them; mounting one of the drives in a 5.25" bay would mean
no active cooling for three of the six drives. Finally, I removed the two
3.5" bezels in order to insure sufficient intake passage for the 92mm fan in the
top 3.5" drive cage.
Custom cut top blowhole with chrome guard, red anodized aluminum mesh filter and quad red LED 80mm exhaust fan
Yes, that's a bad image; no, OCSystem didn't do a bad job on it. While their reputation is pretty poor, I was quite glad to receive the case with a perfectly clean cut top blowhole. Yes, I know the new XaserIIIs already come with an integrated top blowhole from the factory; I purchased my custom modded XaserII before XaserIII was even announced. Actually, many people tell me they like this look much better, plus the airflow is superior to XaserIII's choked top blowhole.
Antec TruePower 550 ATX power supply unit
I know this photo may seems excessive at first, but notice that you can read the label right off the PSU in here; I did that on purpose. If you know PSU specifications well, just take a look at the numbers on this bad boy! Of course, if you understand PSU specs, you probably already know about the TruePower series; ah, what the heck. :-)
Vantec Aeroflow with Zalman Fan Mate (which has been removed recently; this image is now outdated)
Aeroflow is now hooked up to the NXP-201. When the image was taken, Aeroflow was still passing through the Fan Mate onto the mainboard fan header. Opening the side panel to adjust the tiny little rheostat is very, very annoying, so I chained it to the channel of the rear exhausts, as the NXP-201 is far, far superior to access. Before the Aeroflow was in here, I used a Thermaltake Volcano 7+. I installed this mean little HSF and found cooling equal to the Volcano 7+ set to high, but with noise level (with fan set to full speed!) equivalent to the Volcano's low setting. Needless to say, Volcano go bye-bye.
Rear pair of quad red LED 80mm exhaust fans
Not much to say here except that the camera's flash totally ruined the effect of the glowing fans. It's actually way, way brighter than that in person.
Front quad red LED 80mm intake fan (its partners, one 80mm and one 92mm are mounted above in the 3.5" drive bays)
Only the top 92mm fan is visible (in this page's first image, from front of case) and this bottom intake. The other 80mm intake is hidden in the front of the lower 3.5" drive cage, mounted to the back of the case front panel, behind the curved horizontal intake slats, nothing but net. And once again, EasyShare DX4900's Flash-Of-Terror strikes again.
The system core, including Visiontek Xtasy with attached Thermaltake GeForce4 cooling kit, HighPoint RocketRAID 1540, various IEEE1394 Firewire and USB 1.1/2.0 breakout brackets, Audigy 2 and side panel mounted quad red LED 80mm intake fan with black filter
If any one
picture is worth a thousand words, this is most definitely it. Lots going
on in here, including the side panel intake LED fan with (dirty but recently
cleaned) mesh filter, and behind it all the fun stuff. It's really hard to
see the Tt GeForce4 cooler from here (only topside RAMsinks can be seen), but
the fan is clearly blowing optimally onto the graphics card.
The hideous looking Battle of Molex City has actually been
tidied up quite a bit since this image was taken, thank goodness. The thin
grey wires that appear to have two channels are SATA cables, in case you have
not seen them before. There is also, barely noticeable, one of my very
thick and very difficult to manipulate copper braid insulated, rounded PATA/133
cables. Two of those and a matching floppy cable feed the southbridge
interconnected drives.
The RAID rack of quad Maxtor Diamond Max Plus 9 6Y060L0s (bottom 3.5" drive bay and bottom drive on top 3.5" drive bay) and dual Western Digital Caviar WD400BBs (top drives on top 3.5" drive bay)
Yeah baby, the rack! Six blazing 7200rpm ATA drives, organized into dual RAID arrays to terrorize my mainboard's pathetic 32-bit PCI bus. Impressive any way you look at it, and they're all actively cooled. Believe it or not, it's quieter than you would expect; the four Maxtor drives are virtually silent in comparison to the pair of Caviars.
The HighPoint RocketHead 100 SATA-PATA converters used to connect the quad 6Y060L0s to the RocketRAID 1540 with their accompanying molex-molex/floppy power connector splitters
And on the other side of the rack, four PATA-SATA converters, for your eyes only. I noticed that the design of the RocketHeads is precisely identical to the Serillel adapter provided by ABIT with the NF7-S, only in grey casings with different brand markings. If anyone has any good ideas on making the cable jungle more like a forest or better yet, a mere grassy knoll, please let me know.
The twin top mounted red CCFLs
Oh they are way brighter than that; I took the image in the dark with my finger covering the flash, and the camera sort of bugged out on me shooting that way. Both tubes share a single inverter, mounted to the side of my 5.25" drive bays.
The bottom mounted red CCFL
A different brand and design than my top mounted units, this little puppy can't compare to just one of the above units; nonetheless, it adds to the massive red light blast.
The red Lazer LED lamp, mounted on case's aluminum PSU support crossbar and aimed to focus directly on the CPU HSF
Barely visible, but it's the black plastic casing mounted behind the horizontal bar in this image at dead center. The three red LEDs on this tiny component place three incredibly bright deep red spots into the case vertically when seen at an angle from the front and side of the case; there was no way to shoot a picture of that with this camera, sorry. :-/
"The Money $hot"
This is the whole shebang. If I knew how to shoot photos, then you'd understand just how commandingly bright this thing is; my entire room is lit with the lights off at night and I sleep with coverage over my eyes. I have never had a guest walk into the room and not comment on it, and always in a positive tone.
Comments? Questions? Suggestions?
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