Here's a pic of the insides - You can see the size of the CPU heatsink, it's absolutely humongous. I am very happy with the 3-fans-in-a-row air flow for the CPU cooling - one pushing air into the sink from the front, one pulling it out from the back, and the last one on the chassis pulling the air right out of the case. In total, there are
- 3 - 240mm fans - front and side panel pulling air in, top pulling air out.
- 2 - CPU sink mounted 120mm fans, moving air to back of case
- 1 - 140mm fan - back of case pulling cpu air out
- 1 - 120mm fan on the bottom of the case pulling air in (like a vaccuum, gotta watch out)
- 1 - internal power supply unit fan, that pulls air in from the bottom of the PSU and vents out the back, bypassing the case entirely.
This is my first time working with a full size tower case and I was really happy with the amount of space inside. I was able to actually put all the cabling behind the motherboard and out of view. The modular power supply helped a lot with this as well, as all the extra unused cables are stored away nicely in a bag on the side.
There are some interesting overclocking and tweaking features available on this motherboard, including some automated overclocking buttons etc, but I haven't really had the time to play with the settings. There is even a fancy tuning port on the back on the system so you can adjust the clock settings on the fly with another computer.
The only problem I've run into is the viewing angle for the LED monitors. In the default horizontal position, they are suitable for viewing from a left, right, or high angle. It has a terrible low viewing angle. This is fine for the horizontal landscape view of course, but for my veritical setup, this means that the right hand monitor is hard to see unless I move far enough to the right to compensate for the angle, which is a bit limiting. You'll notice that I have the right side screen angled more than the left screen, that is because of this problem. The screen only rotates 90 degrees clockwise, and the mount doesn't support any way to rotate the screen 90 degrees counterclockwise. Just using the above-angle instead of the below-angle would have been the best solution. Either I'm going to have to jury rig something to get that, or buy some monitor arms that can swing whichever way I want.
All in all, I am really happy with the system. It's great for putting various system status & monitoring windows on a side screen and still being able to do things in the plentiful amount of free space still available.
Watching anime or other video stuff is still better on the TV upstairs, cause of the bezels, and a lot of the viewing programs like Media Player Classic and VideoLAN cant seem to handle stretching a media window across multiple screens.
I've played a few games and it is almost overwhelming. Playing City of Heroes, there is so much screen that even those little tight s-bends in the cave maps feels like a huge wide corridor to move in. I lose track of what is going on cause there is so much to see and the status windows are so far away, haha.
Also I picked up the new free Mechwarrior Mercenaries, and it's playing beautifully too, though I can't get it any higher than 2600x1200 (whatever the 3rd highest resolution is) for some reason.
I should try pulling out some of my old game software that can run windowed mode, and see how it goes. It's too bad a lot of old software runs at fixed resolutions like 640x480, 800x600, or 1024x768, not that great for widescreen monitors.
I wonder if there's any utilities to force a giant 3600x1900 fullscreen?
Upsen.
