Boutique Graphics PCs Duke It Out

Digital Storm Hardware, Continued

Digital Storm also added two more 120 mm exhaust fans to the TJ09’s stock lid mounts, which are normally left empty by Silverstone. This proved to be a great place for attaching the dual radiators of its custom liquid cooling kit.

Two Corsair Dominator 8500 CAS5 2 GB modules are installed beside the CPU water block, without the additional 3-fan RAM cooler.

Notice that Digital Storm adds cable sleeves to all its coolant lines for a high-tech appearance, but these must be seen to be appreciated. Cold-cathode tubes reflect the inner beauty through the clear side panel window.

Then again, there’s nothing more beautiful about a PC than the stuff it can put on your screen, especially if it has powerful 3D processors. Digital Storm equipped this system with two of eVGA’s finest "SuperClocked" 8800 Ultras, specified at 655 MHz for the graphics core and GDDR3-2250 for RAM.

Frame rates might be the primary concern of a gaming system, but slow load times would dampen the experience. Our configuration includes two 10,000 RPM Western Digital Raptor 150 GB drives in a RAID 0 configuration (in the top drive cage), and just so you won’t run out of storage space, two 750 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 drives (lower cage) again in RAID 0 mode.

The photo above also provides a closer look at the cross-chassis cool-air intake tunnel and intake fan, which points towards the graphics cards.

Four cores, four drives, two graphics cards, and loads of overclocking are going to need a bunch of stable power. Digital Storm uses a Turbo-Cool 1000 W unit from the industry’s most respected brand : PC Power & Cooling. This is probably 40% more power than the system will actually consume, but with so much going to 12 V devices, we’re happy to have more than we need.