Nothing drastic has changed mind you, but there's going to be a lot of storage on this puppy. For a couple of reasons, not the least being my curiosity in running SaS in a hot-swappable box, I've decided to move the super fast, but hot running SaS drives into an external enclosure. Inside the 3D Mercury case instead will be two 750GB Western Digital Caviar SE16s which are one of, if not the fastest large capacity desktop SATA drives you can buy. I'll be running them in RAID 0 of course and it's formatting as we speak; and formatting, and formatting, and formatting... Large drive, long format time.

In the concessions post I said I wasn't going to attach the front panel HD audio header. I re-thought this with a little prodding from the test center's Thomas Luong and found a path for it underneath the back of the two 9800 GX2s. You'll still have to enable the HD audio in the BIOS to use it, but that's easy enough. I'm pretty sure once you hear the 1616m you won't bother.

I installed Flight Sim so we could show a cool three monitor surround cockpit during the final video. Unfortunately, it didn't work out. Probably some sort of driver issue with the 9800 GX2s but I really don't know as of yet. No video of that, but I'll post pics ASAP. Also, we should manage to WorldBench this machine tomorrow so scores should be forthcoming.

Subjectively, Windows doesn't seem quite as snappy with this setup as it did with the D5400XS though the game play is sensational. Not by much mind you, but though the D5400XS didn't WorldBench startlingly well--somewhere in the mid 130's in our trial runs--it sure felt fast. Some of that I attributed to the SSDs, perhaps mistakenly (not that they aren't fast). Maybe I'm just getting used to all these faster speeds...

I spent part of the day re-routing power cables around the back of the machine to help with appearances. If I haven't said so already, I think I insulted the ThermalTake W1033 be inference when I talked about the Ultra X3's superior quality connectors. The W1033's are just fine.

I've already started working on a document explaining the ins and outs of the Dream PC for whoever wins it. There's not all that much to explain but there are a few gotchas such as both Windows partitions (XP and Vista) being visible. That means leave them alone when the other operating system running. With over 2TB of auxiliary storage that shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Final assembly and bling touchup tomorrow. Gotta' love those Velcro cable ties that come with the ThermalTake.

Cheers, Jon