Not “tomorrow” anymore, but here’s more.

The power supply – a beast by yesterday’s standards, but these days 750 watts seems almost ordinary. Nice thing about it is that it’s modular. Power supplies used to have a mess of cables coming out the back, and if you didn’t use them all you’d have to bundle the remainder up or find some place for them to go. Now, you use only what you need and store the rest in the box for later.

Incidentally, here is the bag all the cables came in.

The power supply, mounted in the bottom of the case. Another sign of the times – power supplies used to be mounted on top. The way air flows through a case, by the time it reaches the top-mounted power supply, it’s already fairly well-heated, and power supplies generate a fair amount of heat themselves. Now when warm air rises, it simply exhausts out the back.

Speaking of airflow and temperatures, why did I remove this massive fan from the top of the case? We’ll see in awhile.

ASUS P8Z68-V PRO motherboard. More than adequate for folks who don’t classify as extremely high-end, but not bargain barrel stuff either.

Serial ATA ports. This board supports adding eight hard drives (or seven hard drives and a DVD burner, or some other combination of the two), so it’s good for some of the more exotic configurations such as RAID.

The CPU socket (center) and RAM slots (lower-right).

The input and output ports that will be exposed on the back of the case. With onboard video, audio, networking, USB, and even bluetooth, it’s possible to run the entire setup just through the board without any extras. But where’s the fun in that?

The CPU socket, exposed and ready for installation. The gate folds back down and secures the CPU in place. One interesting thing about this particular socket is the pins. Normally the pins protrude from the bottom of the CPU and meet contacts in the socket, but here the pins come up from out of the socket and meet contacts on the CPU.

The underside of the CPU. This is an Intel Core i5-2500K. Like the motherboard, satisfactory for most folks who don’t need to be on the bleeding edge (and don’t mind cutting $100 here and there off of the price of their new computer).

The heat spreaders on these sticks of memory are entirely too aggressive-looking for a part that will never be seen while it’s in use. This is 16GB of memory. Quite a lot, if you think about it. It wasn’t that long ago that you couldn’t even find hard drives this big.

The CPU and memory are installed and ready to work.

This is a Corsair H100 CPU cooler. CPUs generate heat, and liquid cools better than air, which makes this a very interesting idea. The block sits above the CPU, transporting heat to the radiator, which is then blown off – through the top of the case – by a pair of fans. After a few days in service, I can say this thing does a really fantastic job of keeping the CPU cool when I put it through the paces.

The H100, installed.

The video card is installed. In the lower right (almost cut off) you can see the hard drives mounted in the bottom cage. I had three total – a solid state drive for Windows and some bare essentials, and two traditional drives for bulk storage. The SSD’s advantage is that it is much faster and much quieter than its elder siblings, but the drawback is that it’s significantly more expensive. As technology continues to advance, the older drives will probably no longer be needed by regular folks.

Here’s a shot of the computer, finally on its feet, with all the components installed and cabling run. The nice thing about this case is that the cutouts to the right and underneath the motherboard allow you to run cabling in such a way that it only exposes itself right in front of where you need to plug it in. This allows air to move through the case with fewer obstructions.

For reference, this is how the inside of my old computer looked. The case is much smaller and didn’t have many of the same amenities as the newer one does, so cabling kind of had to go wherever you could put it. That’s not to say the computer didn’t work, it was just a real pain to service and clean.

It’s been two and a half years since I last built a new PC. At the time I speculated that, having beefed up quite a bit on the components, I could get three years out of it. Turns out I was half-right – it’s still in service now and would easily make it to the three-year mark, but it’ll probably blow right past that. It handled Deus Ex: Human Revolution and a couple of other newer games this year without too much trouble, and handles the demands I put on it for work just fine as well.

Still, I’m in a position to be able to upgrade and can conceivably play the “graduation/Christmas present to myself” card right now, so here we are. The first shipment showed up in the mail over the weekend, with the remainder on its way in tomorrow. So here are a few pictures of the case to start.

A look at the front and left panel of the case. I picked this one because it’s one of the few cases left in the world that doesn’t look like a UFO just landed. No multicolored lights, no weird designs. Just solid black with straight edges. It’s also lighter than I expected, too – much more so than the Antec Sonata 550 I used in 2009. The Sonata itself was also pretty understated – solid colors, nothing flashy – but it’s also not big enough on the inside for the newer full-sized graphics cards.

The right panel and rear. Not a huge fan of the window in the side of the case, but it’s not that big of a deal. Notice the latches on the top of the panel. The case uses a latching system to keep the panels on, rather than screws. That makes it a lot easier to get in for maintenance. On the rear are a couple holes for water cooling systems, a hole in the top-left for running USB 3.0 cables out of (in case you can’t plug some front-panel USB 3.0 ports directly in on the board), and the power supply is mounted at the bottom for better control over the heat.

Here’s the case with the panel pulled off. There is an insane amount of room in here, so everything will go in comfortably. There is a generous-sized cutout for backplates in case someone plans to install a heftier heatsink-fan over the CPU, along with a number of circular rubber cutouts used for threading cabling out of the way of airflow. (In other words, the cable from the hard drive to the motherboard would disappear behind the panel and pop up in the cutout closest to where it would go on the board.)

A closeup on the cutouts. Some of them will only be available when you use smaller motherboards (notice the posts sticking up in the middle, that’s where the board would be mounted), but there are still plenty to go around for the larger varieties.

A closeup on the 3.5″ drive bays. Each tray is flexible and snaps around the drive, then slides and locks into the bay. Between this and the latches on the outside, Corsair did a really nice job of making most builds with this case a screwless effort. Having said that, for 2.5″ drives, particularly solid state drives, there are a couple of screw holes that you must use to secure them. The top cage can be relocated in case you need the extra clearance for a really long expansion card.

The front and top panels. The front panel flips down to reveal a reset switch, firewire, two USB 2.0 ports, headphone and microphone jacks, and two USB 3.0 ports. The cabling behind the USB 3.0 ports is long enough to go out the back of the case (through that hole in the upper-left) to be plugged into the rear USB 3.0 ports on the motherboards in the event that the board doesn’t have a lead you can plug directly into. The top panel slides back to reveal SATA connectivity. You can either plug a 2.5″ drive in, or the notch on the left side pushes down to support a 3.5″ drive as well. This may come in handy as a dock.

More to come tomorrow.