Look And Feel, Continued

The current system chassis is the second revision of this case. The first was only a beta version which debuted at the ATI Ultimate LAN in Dallas earlier this year. The case we had in our lab is AAC's second attempt at a water-cooled acrylic case. The first chassis was called the Poseidon, but internally the second revision was called Poseidon Mark 2.

Plenty of space for more drives

If you are looking at this case wondering how you can put your own components into it, forget about it. The case itself is not for sale. AAC wants the owners of their Liquid XS systems to have a case that is essentially a limited sale. The idea is that a customer's system, just like an exotic car, should be only one of a few like it in the world. So if you want one of these acrylic creations, let us save you the embarrassment of asking. You will be politely told you cannot buy it separately.

The cables are neatly moved out of view.

Because of the dynamics of an acrylic case, it forces the cabling to be done with the utmost precision. All of the wires are tied down to keep them in place. One thing that Kyle and his crew at All American takes pride in his custom length cables. You will notice that every cable is the exact length it needs to be. This increases airflow in the case for cooling as well as makes everything look perfectly clean. Besides, if it were not oh so perfect, the whole system would look terrible from every angle. You cannot hide blemishes behind transparent walls.

The coolant hoses are all cut to proper lengths. Throughout the case ½-inch clear hoses are used to connect all of the water blocks, radiators, the pump and the reservoir. There is one 3/8" hose used in the case. This hose connects the two water blocks on the graphics cards. The larger hose helps to keep a kink from forming due to the tight u-turn the hose has to make from connecting card to card.

Cool graphics makes a happy set of XFX 7800 GTX graphics cards

Some of the systems we have in our review set only have a couple of fans to move any air inside the case. We have seen some that do not have any fans for cooling. You might think that since the CPU and graphics processors are cool, the power supply will take care of the rest. As Alex Trebek would say, "Oh sorry, wrong answer."