I'm not hugely familiar with US system builder Digital Storm , since they don't have an outlet on this side of the Atlantic, but the 'boutique' PC maker has just added an impressive looking new case to its line up that rather makes me wish they did.
It uses the first case that the company has designed itself, apparently, something which is almost unheard of for an independent shop, certainly since Alienware and VoodooPC were bought out by Dell and HP respectively. The 'Aventum', as Digital Storm's new range is known, may not have the catchiest name and it certainly has a bleeding eye price, but it's intriguing, nonetheless.
At first glance, the Aventum looks a bit mundane. A straightforward silver tower without much in the way of distinguishing features. What's interesting about it, however, is the inclusion of a liquid cooling system with a Peltier-style heat exchanger in the base supplied by Cryo-TEC. Apparently this is able to drop the temperature of the coolant to below zero, thanks to three 420mm radiators.
More intriguing yet, however, is the internal design. It's chambered around components in order to prevent heat from escaping around the case, using a modular technique similar to cases from the likes of Thermaltake. The clever thing, though, is that the motherboard is flipped upside down to the norm. This puts the hottest components, the GPUs, at the top of the main chamber, thus stopping the heat they generate getting drawn over the CPU, power regulators and other temperature sensitive gubbins.
By the looks of it, it'll do a fine job of keeping things cool by itself, but the case is also filled with sensors and comes with Windows software for managing fan speeds in 13 locations manually too.
There's four different versions of the Aventum available, starting with one equipped with an Intel Core i7 2700K and GeForce GTX 680 and scaling up to a dual Xeon workstation with 680s in triple SLI mode.
The only downside? Prices start at $3,859 and go up in increments of more than $1,000 for each model. One can dream.
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