Internally, some of us at Tom's Hardware have taken to calling custom PC gaming builds "sportscars." They're these beautiful things meant to be ogled, and you just can't build them yourself, but sometimes a certain system is so over-the-top that we give it a different classification -- that of a spaceship.
The Digital Storm Aventum 3 is a spaceship.
Although you can configure an Aventum 3 for around $3,000, the beastly model we saw at CES will actually run you closer to $6,000. We gave it one of our Tom's Hardware CES Top Picks awards.
The first thing that strikes you when you see the Aventum 3 is the luminescent blue lighting and the white-colored hard tubing, with shiny chrome-colored fittings. The glass reservoir is also (of course) filled with white coolant, and even the cabling is white, which adds to the whole visceral effect.
The Digital Storm guys bent all their own tubing, and they used BitsPower water blocks, fittings, pumps and radiators.
If you look around back, you'll see that there are actually fittings back there and more hard tubing, connecting the whole loop through the back panel. Further, note that instead of just wrapping cables all over the place, Digital Storm put fan controller units and power cable mounts on the back. This eliminates a great deal of the cable clutter by keeping so much of it around the back of the motherboard while also making it exceptionally easy to swap out cables from the modular PSU without messing anything up.
The back is so pretty that Digital Storm built a window into that side panel.
You can also opt for a version of the Aventum 3 with soft and quick disconnects. Digital Storm had just such a rig to show off in its CES suite (tricked out with Canary yellow coolant). A product rep demonstrated how well the fittings worked by casually popping one off. A few drops of coolant, which had worked their way into the fitting, was all the leakage there was.
There are three -- three -- radiators on board this version of the Aventum 3. There's a massive 560 mm radiator on the right side with four 140 mm fans all nicely lit, as well as a 280 mm radiator on the left side (2 x 140 mm fans) and a 420 mm radiator on the top (3 x 140 mm fans). To round things out, Digital Storm slapped four 140 mm fans on the front of the case and a couple of 120 mm fans behind the motherboard tray.
The 28.5-inch tall case offers eight HDD bays and eight expansion slots. This particular build had two Nvidia cards in SLI (with that nice-looking hard SLI bridge), but Digital Storm told us that you can have up to four. You'd have to redo all that hard tubing yourself to get four cards in there, which probably isn't advisable, but even with two cards, you get more than enough video out options.
There's a slim ODD (a full 5.25-inch drive wouldn't look as pretty), and the case offers two USB 3.0 ports, an SD card slot, micro SD card slot, and headphone and mic jacks. The motherboard's I/O panel also offers another 10 USB 3.0 slots, two USB 2.0 ports (one that offers USB BIOS Flashback), dual LAN ports, five audio jacks, S/PDIF out, and more.
Inside the main part of the case, above the radiator, you can get custom cutouts in the metal. Digital Storm had "Aventum 3" on this unit, but you can put whatever you want.
Finally, although the blue lights and white accents are beautiful, you can also switch the lighting to white, red and/or green, using the little remote that Digital Storm made. In addition to the colors, you can set the lights to flicker, pulse and more. (Just in case you need to draw a little more attention to the rig.)
Digital Storm told us that the company actually does sell a number of these tricked-out beasts, despite the price tag, and you'll be able to get one of your own sometime this spring.
Follow Seth Colaner@SethColaner. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.
