divine figures. Themis, for example, is a Titaness whose purview is law, and order:
one could arguably call her the "parent of justice," ha ha, hence the name. [The first
machine I built for Jeff was Justicia, a Roman sort-of version of Themis.] So this computer,
the slightly-badder-ass not-quite-twin of Themis, is Nemesis, the spirit of divine retribution,
the dark twin of justice: revenge.
Yay, it's a case! And optical drives. The 302 turns out to be a pretty exciting enclosure,
actually.
The MSI Radeon 6750, along with the Asus motherboard. I pictured them together
because, seriously, why is the video card box the same size as the mobo box? I get that
the VGA cooler is big, but quelle the fuck? Turns out it's largely foam.
The very thing. What a looker. I have to do some more testing tonight, when it's very
quiet out, and I've disconnected the hard drives [about which, more, later], but I think
this thing is basically inaudible even at the hottest I've gotten it. The stock Intel HSF is
the loudest fan in the system, I'm pretty certain. Very nice blower on this MSI.
It's an i5, alright. 3.7ghz when it needs to be, on a single core. It's been a challenge
finding anything that really pushes it, beyond brute-force benchmarking tools like SuperPi
and Prime95. It's that fast.
Kovu clearly doesn't like seeing super-low-voltage RAM marred by useless and vulgar
heatspreaders. G.SKILL, please, stop it. Do you actually think gamers are buying these?
Speaking of pointless and vulgar, I get a case for the modular cables you don't end up
hooking up, although a zip-lock would be fine, but a fake velvet bag for the power supply
that I'm about to permanently put in a case? Stupid and wasteful.
3TB, all told. By far - by far - the loudest thing in the case. Unbelievable seek noise,
particularly. Some of it is the lack of soft-mounts, some of it is the comparatively thin
metal of sub-$100 cases, but a lot of it is the drives themselves. I'm completely sold on
an SSD after listening to this for two days.
The thing is, they're not that loud, but everything else makes almost no noise at all,
so by comparison it's maddening. I'll see what I can work out.
Shen, generously not eating the fans. Piggy, relieved at the break from being
eaten by Shen.
Yeah, seriously, you can pay for Windows. It comes in a box, with numbers and
everything. Who knew?
The case. Pretty understated, which I like. Very open, which has pros and cons. The
inside is so simply well-designed that I'm seriously considering it for my next case, if I
don't get a P-18x. My biggest complaint is the top-mounted 140mm fan, which is an odd
size, and not something I can replace with a Nexus. But I'd just seal it over, anyway.
They're serious about cable management: pull ties included. And drive rails: almost the
entire case is tool-free; basically only expansion cards require anything, and that a
Phillips head screw driver.
Intake for the power supply fan that we don't have. Notice the back-side fan under the
processor, and the accordant giant opening in the motherboard tray. Not only is this
good for cooling, but it means not ever having to unscrew the motherboard if changing
processor heatsinks. It also means the depth required to fit a fan in there gives a couple
inches' space between the bottom of the motherboard tray and the outside of the case,
ample room for cable routing. And notice the long, lozenge cuts up the length of the
motherboard, just beyond the edges of the ATX form factor. See, somebody was
thinking.
The front panel connections, pre-routed to do what I had to do myself [twice, if you
recall] on Themis' 300. And tin-snips not required for this job. Very slick.
Got most everything routed. This was the first build; I've made some changes since then,
based on the testing I'm doing. The drives, for example, were getting really hot -
like, the hottest things in the system, by far - so I've given them their own fan. I'm going
to do some testing to see whether it's better to intake cold air there - and have the
drives heat the interior! - or make the front an exhaust as well, using the plane of the
drives to prevent short-circuiting the air flow around the front. We'll see.
Windows 7 is on it, and it's been rock-steady for the past 48 hours of stress testing and
jiggery-pokery. Adding a couple more fans, removing one of the stock ones, finding the
right fan speeds to run in 100F+ conditions. Every game I throw at it - GTA4, Dragon
Age 2, Civilization V, Mass Effect 3, Skyrim - they all run at 60FPS and stay pegged there
~100 percent of the time, with all graphical options set to highest. It's unreal. I'm
basically not recommending to any clients that they get anything faster unless they're
running multiple monitors, i.e. Eyefinity.
And let's not forget that another $200 would pick up another of these silent killers for
Crossfire action, and 8 monitors or something. Really quite something.
But tomorrow is offroading, so here's where it stands until Monday. Enough time inside
when it's this nice out!
The thing is, this computer is using exactly the same cooler as Themis, and you don't find it offensive, so this is probably just one of these cases of me being me. 
Thanks again!
