Inside Digital Storm's x17
On the previous page, we suggested that heat might limit the amount of time you'd want to spend gaming with the x17 on your lap, and fan location is the primary reason for that. With intake vents almost perfectly aligned to your legs, starving the cooling subsystem of airflow seems like it'd be easy to do on accident.
Once we pull off the bottom covers, we see the hard drive and half of the notebook's memory. Those parts can be removed without unscrewing anything else.
A second 2.5” drive bay is exposed by sliding out the optical drive (right). CPU and GPU fans are mounted directly to the chassis, and can be left in place if you need to pull off their corresponding heat sinks.
Four #1 Phillips screws secure the CPU heat pipe, and are easily removed. The GPU and graphics memory sinks are held in place by smaller #0 screws. The CPU socket latch and GPU module stand-offs are slotted for a thin flat-head screwdriver.
The x17's baseline 750 GB hard drive saves $80 compared to the 120 GB Intel SSD 520 found on Xotic PC's NP9150. The hard drive also adds a bunch of storage capacity, though it's naturally quite a bit slower.
Also shown in the above photo are the secondary drive tray and the optical drive that covers it. If you want both capacity and speed, add an SSD to one of the system's two bays.
