Another day, another build! This time it's the Xooma X2O case. My first "theme" case.

The customer had already selected the case they wanted and they wanted it to have a Xooma green look to it. (You can find Xooma via Google if you're curious, the race car video is the best way to see their look.) I had a pretty limited budget and I was locked into the case and the power supply that came with it. By the way, has anyone ever heard of TurboLink? Yeah, me either. But thats what we got, and it seems to be an okay power supply. It's a little light on the 12v rail but what are you going to do? The Aspire case came packaged well, and like so many cheap cases, with very limited instructions. I'll be repacking the case the same way for shipping to the customer. By the way, a good tip, most motherboard come with a soft foam piece under them. I save these and use them during my builds to prevent the case from being scratched, you can see several in the finished case pic below.

This machine is NOT going to be overclocked. It's going to run Xp Home and Office 2003 and that's pretty much it. Still, I hope they'll do some gaming some day, so I put a GeForce 7600GS in it. It's a good card and it was very affordable at time of purchase. Plus it uses less electricity than the previous generation and that means less heat. As I picked quiet low rpm fans I really needed to watch my heat build up. The 7600GS should match this design pretty well.

I like active cooling on hard drives so the first step was to get the case down to bare metal (after testing all the fans on another rig to make sure they worked). The Thermaltake fans are pretty quiet and the color on them is great. Mounting was a little annoying. This case mostly has folded metal edges but the drive bays will get you. No question about it. A few scrapes later and the two front fans are in. The top fan comes along pretty quickly after that.

I've never used green LED fans, but I have to say these look really good. Next up I put the risers in for the mother board and then install the CPU and memory. This is my first time using Patriot memory. So today's learning experience is exploring a new company. The memory looks good and it's easy to grab because of the heat spreaders. The 2-3-2-5 timings on the memory should give this machine a little extra speed. Nothing earthshaking but a little here and there helps. With 2GB of memory, this machine is likely set for life.

The case has just enough room by the drive bays to hide a lot of wiring, that's a good thing because each fan come with A LOT of wiring. This will all be run and tied down soon. For now, it's just a matter of getting the cables to the right location.

So now the optical drives and hard drive go in. This case has colored Rom covers. This means the drives have to sit all the way to the back of the mount AND it means we need screws on both sides of the drive. This is really a big pain because now the case front doesn't really fit so well. I could remove the black face plates on the Nec-3550a drives but that would look a little scary to the customer so instead I do what happens all to often with a cheap case, I force it. It works, but it's not how I like to do things.

With everything in place it's time for first real test boot. Everything comes up and it's looking pretty good. I shut it down and clean up the cables. All in all it looks pretty good. The OS goes on without issue as does Office 2003 Basic and there you have it. A quick generally uneventful build. It's funny, there just wasn't much to this build. It's in, it looks good, and it should meet the customer's expectations.

Below are some images of the final result. I am pretty happy with it. It's got a good look to it. It should look good in the dark and look good in full light as well. It's quiet and I haven't turned on cool and quite yet which would make it even more quiet. So, in the end, I'm happy.