A Sweet System

Even though Smooth Creations is a new to the boutique system builders game, they have started developing a name for creating incredibly artistic designs, as well impressively performing ones. Today we are taking a quick preview look at an all AMD-based system that uses a Phenom II processor and HD 4870 GPUs.
I don’t usually just post collections of images for products we get in but this system build from Smooth Creations is unique enough that
I wanted to do so.  A system that the company passed on to us for review, I ran out of time before heading to Taiwan for Computex to get all the performance testing complete but I happened to have taken the below photos ready.  And I was sitting on a 13 hour plane ride looking for work to complete.

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Smooth Creations is a relatively new vendor for complete system builds but has been making great looking chassis for quite a long time.  The system we have here is a completely acrylic case with a red tint and a paint job of a…wait for it…dragon.

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The photo doesn’t show the painting very well due to lighting but you should be able to make out a red dragon with wings extended and of course fire shooting from its face.  

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Looking at the side panel where you can access the components you see the wrap around of the painting on the dragon’s tail and fire breath.  

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Removing the side door involves four screws and lightly leaning the system towards the door so that it drops down allowing (requiring) you to catch it.  There aren’t any hinges or anything on this design as they would break up the translucency of the case.  You can clearly see that this case is BIG; you could almost fit two motherboards stacked on top of each other.

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The motherboard in the system is a Foxconn A79A-S featuring the AMD 790GX chipset and support for up to four graphics card and CrossFire X.

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The Foxconn board has a great collection of connections and features including 6 USB 2.0 ports, 2 eSATA ports, FireWire, two types of digital audio output, dual Gigabit Ethernet and of course support for 6-channel analog HD audio.  

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The dragon system uses a Phenom II X4 955 processor and 4GB of DDR2-1066 memory.

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The entire system is powered by a Topower 1100 watt PowerBird PSU and features a pair of VelociRaptor hard drives.  Not shown is the Blu-ray burner in the 5.25-in optical position.

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Don’t worry, the system does in fact come with graphics cards as well – a pair of AMD Radeon HD 4890 1GB GPUs in CrossFire mode!

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One thing this case has enough of is cooling – there are three huge 120mm fans on the front of the chassis and three 100mm fans on the back of the case in addition to the power supply fan.  

As another surprise: we’ll probably be giving this system away to a faithful reader or podcast listener (thanks to Smooth Creations for that) in the not-too-distant future.  Stay tuned for that.  😉

Now that we are back from covering the news of Computex this week in Taiwan you can be sure we’ll be putting this system through its paces and have a full review soon.