No Guts,
No Glory
26 | MAXIMUMPC | SEP 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com
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Dream Machine ’08 sports some serious innards
No Guts, No Guts, No Guts, No Guts, No Guts, No Guts, No Guts, No Guts, No Guts, No Guts, No Guts,
DREAM MACHINE ’
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If your quad-core CPU runs out of gas when you try to simultaneously en-
code videos and play games, you need to see Doc Octo. These two 4GHz
Core 2 Extremes have enough execution power to throw any application
to the ground.The hard drives are located in fi ve hot-swap bays, each connected to a
backplane that serves as the electronics hub of the Blackbird chassis. You
access it by unscrewing the side of the chassis from both the interior and
exterior. This is a bit of legwork, but it’s the only way you can replace a SATA
cable or turn the case’s various LED lights on and off.You might recognize this unique case as the one used to house HP’s Black-
bird PC. We were able to pull some strings to get the enclosure for DM.
The only modifi cations we made to it—besides the nickel plating (more
on that later)—was drilling eight holes into what was the Blackbird’s
tabbed-locking cooling mechanism attached to the top of the case’s inte-
rior. This let us attach the water-cooling radiator to the case from the top
down; it was either that, or drill super-long screws through the radiator
itself—not a wise solution.Oddly, you can thank AMD’s aborted QuadFX platform for Intel’s Skull-
trail. While AMD doesn’t have the resources to continue offering insane
platforms to insane enthusiasts, Intel does. The D5400XS performance-
oriented, multi-proc motherboard is proof of that, and its use of Nvidia’s
nForce 100 chips makes it the only platform to support both SLI and
CrossFire with public drivers.The Blackbird case sports a vertical 5.25-inch bay for the optical drive. We
easily slid our LG GBW-H20L Blu-ray burner into the opening using the
bundled drive rails. When the drive’s not in use, it’s kept hidden behind a
door that slides out from the front grill.The Blackbird can also accommodate two slimline optical drives, which
we had no need for. So we opted to use the openings in the front of the
chassis as a window to our cooling efforts by installing the reservoir
there. We can now check fl uid levels just by glancing at the front of our
case—and watching the coolant slam against the reservoir’s sides is
oddly mesmerizing.ATI’s code name for its new top-tier card is R700, but its real name ought
to be Butt-Kicking Benchmark Buster because these dual-GPU cards are
fast. How fast? We saw more than double the performance we could get
from competing cards in our Skulltrail setup.