Holiday Upgrades Review
Seasons greetings from Unique Rigs
Silverstone DA700 PSU & Suscool 121 Fan
When doing upgrades, the PSU is often overlooked. When you upgrade your PC parts especially the ones that eats up a lot of power, it really helps to have a very reliable and stable PSU in your rig. In this holiday guide, Silverstone was kind enough to send us one of their power house PSU. The Silverstone DA700 is part of Silverstone's Decathlon line of PSUs. Looking inside, this PSU is packed with high grade parts. The sheer weight alone tells you how well built these PSUs are. It uses a single 120mm fan to cool the internal parts when it's operational. Since it uses a 120mm fan, you can be sure this bad boy is very silent. It also uses modular connectors, making cable management fast and easy. One very good spec that stands out is the single 12v rail that is rated at 58amps. At this rating, you should be able to run a high end SLI setup with no issues. We tested the unit with our over clocked E6750 at 3.6Ghz with an SLI 8800GT video card as well as two 500GB hard drive and two 1TB hard drive on a RAID0 setup. We ran PCMark Vantage for six hours straight and the system never crashed once. We also didn't see any major fluctuations on any of the rails during testing. If you're looking for reliable PSUs, you can't go wrong with Silverstone's selection. 
Time and time again, Silverstone puts out very high quality products and their PSU are no exceptions. Silverstone was also kind enough to send us one of their 120mm fans, the Suscool 121. The fan has a built in thermal probe built in so it can auto adjust its speed when necessary. The Suscool also is very silent during normal operation. The fan colour also has a sleek blue colour. We attached the Suscool to our NT-06 we have previously reviewed and they match up very well, adding this upgrade really cooled down the CPU area in the interior of our case, decreasing the ambient temperature at about 5 degrees. If you're looking for 120mm fans, give the Suscool 121 a look. You can be sure that your case's interior will nice and cool.
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Cooler Master ATCS 840
Looking for a high-end case? Cooler Master is well known for their very good case selections. Their cases have also been featured on a number of PC magazines over the years. This will be our first time reviewing a case enclosure from Cooler Master. Cooler Master was kind enough to send us their new ATCS 840 full tower case. Out of the box, this case is massive. Looking at its size, the case is actually pretty light. The outer shell is made up of entirely from aluminum. One thing we noticed was the pop-up front panel ports located just on top of the case, very clever design. The interior the ATCS 840 is very vast. It can hold up to five 5.25" drive as well as six 3.5" drives. The 5.25" bays are secured via press on rails which not only makes the installation tool less; it also makes it very fast and simple. The 3.5" bays use drive trays that securely clips on the 3.5" bay frame. The PSU chamber is located at the bottom of the case. However, you can also place the PSU on top of the case with the mounts Cooler Master has provided. There are also a couple of filters located on the bottom of the case to keep dust out. It also uses three massive 230mm fans inside the case. One is located at the front of the case and two are located on top, underneath a metal mesh. There is also a 120mm fan located at back of the case for more cooling. You can also add a couple of extra 120mm fans inside via a plastic mount located near the hard drive chambers. There is also a removable motherboard tray for the case, which makes installing the motherboard and other peripherals you would like to install. As an option, you can replace the two 230mm fans with Cooler Master’s Aquagate Max cooling kit, if you wish to take the water cooling path. Cooler Master also included an exhaust duct for your GPU which attached nicely at back of the case. Cooler Master has built this case with a lot of amenities. The case is built solid and the interior cooling has very good air flow from the gigantic 230mm fans. Cooler Master has released plenty of high grade quality cases over the years; the ATCS 830 is no exception. If you’re looking to get a high end tower, take a look at this case.
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Western Digital WD1001FALS Hard Drive
Bigger hard drives allow you to put more files on your computer. Files nowadays are getting so big a 500GB hard drive can look so minuscule. This holiday, Western Digital was kind enough to send us a couple of samples of their Caviar Black hard drive. The particular model we tested was the 1TB model WD1001FALS. These models come with a huge 32 MB cache and with a speed of 7200 RPM. Our samples came in an OEM packaging as well as cable accessories. What better way to test these puppies out but to put it on a RAID array setup. We used our 680i's built in RAID controller to setup our RAID array. We picked RAID 0 as our array to get the highest transfer rate we could achieve. Setting the two drives on a RAID array was pretty straight forward with our 680i's on board RAID controller. We first installed Vista 64 on the raided 1TB drives and see how long it would take to boot. Boot time was fairly fast, it took about 30 seconds to go from POST to the Windows Vista login screen. Performance wise, the chart below speaks for itself. You can clearly see the performance difference when you use the drive on a single drive setup and with a RAID array configuration. The burst speed and read times increases significantly with the WD1001FALS if it is on a RAID 0 configurations. We also used PC Markvantage for benchmark testing and held up pretty well. If you're looking for more storage for your rig, a hard drive upgrade is the way to go. Western Digital hard drives are one of the most reliable drives on the market. Most of the motherboards now have built in RAID controllers on them, making it so very easy to setup any RAID configurations for your home desktop. The WD1001FALS are very fast drives, combine it with a RAID 0, you will get one fast drive on your rig.
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Another year has gone by and we here at Unique Rigs would like to thank you, our readers for your support. We also would like to thank our sponsors that provide us with products as well as helping us put together our hardware reviews to share with our readers. We would like to wish you all a happy holidays and a joyous new year!
