Page 2 -- Meet the Neptune
Meet the Neptune (and his daughter)
Smooth Creations pretty much do high-end PC's. This we like, we Guru - says voice in Yoda's style. They also paint their own creations from a nice selection of themes, as well as supplying a few companies, Coolermaster CSX line among them, with a steady supply of custom painted cases.
As we've seen with Hilbert's Project-X, Smoothcreations will also paint your case with whatever theme floats your boat. So, SmoothCreations is a custom shop, even though they sent us a top-of-the-line machine, they'll happily work with you on a custom config, paint job, or whatever you can think of for your creation.
It's as simple as telling them what you want. Not bad. And the paint job's free if you buy the whole machine from them, and they'll ship it to you for free inside the US. Not bad.
The Neptune, in this case, is one of their pre-built monstrosities in their Xtreme Machines series. Let's take a look at the parts used in the build:
- Motherboard: ASUS Rampage II Extreme
- CPU: Intel Core i7 965 Extreme 3.2GHz
- Graphics: 2x nVidia 280GTX with Danger Den waterblocks
- RAID 0 (OS): 2x Western Digital 300GB VelociRaptor
- RAID 1 (DATA): 2x Western Digital 1TB
- Memory: Corsair Dominator 12GB DDR3 1600
- 1st Optical Drive: Lite-on BD O DH4O1S Blue-ray DVD+R (just a Blu-ray reader)
- 2nd Optical Drive: Lite-on iHAS220 20x DVD+R light Scribe
- PSU: Silverstone ZM1200M 1200w
- OS: Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit
- Case: Danger Den DD Tower 26 2 bay w/custom paint
- Cooling: Danger Den Cooling system
As you can see the Neptune is pretty much top of the line, showing that the system builders at SmoothCreations did their homework. It's not cheap either, with its cost being about $6000USD. That's quite a lot of cash. It is a very solid build, however, and there isn't anything I can think of to change that would make it a better machine. If I had to pick anything, maybe add some SSD storage for the OS drive or maybe some of that GTX295 H2O love Hilbert likes so much.
You could go out and buy all the parts yourself, and a vast majority of our readers already do, but you don't have to assemble and test the thing. SmoothCreations included a quality control check list with the Neptune, and I've got to say, it's the most comprehensive I've seen. Not that I've seen a lot of those, but be assured they do a very complete job on testing the box before its shipped to you. Jim Saling, the CEO, told me they burned in this system for 3 days at 4.2GHz. Not bad.
Let's take a look at the Neptune in excruciating detail, shall we?
