09.05.06
Soa Pro II: The Opening
Cracked open the Mac Pro this weekend so I could throw in a pair of 160gb SATA drives for Boot Camp and backups. The picture is awful, but that’s what you get with a camera phone in the hands of a jackass. The quality of this case is astonishing. I’ve never worked on any PC case that was this well laid out and rock solid. Even when I spend upwards of $200. To get inside you pull on a lockable lever on the back and that will release the holds on the case as well as the SATA drive bays. The side plating is very heft and has padding around the edge to lower noise from vibration and keep the case as airtight for the airflow.
SATA drives are very easy to install. Just screw them onto the enclosure and slide it in. The power and communication connectors are mounted on a plate in the back and it clicks right in. The RAM looks to be similarly simple. I haven’t done the RAM upgrade yet, but those daughter boards slide right out. Each one has 4 DIMM slots. The video card is nearly impossible to see, which is fine since it’s just a boring video card. It rests right on top of the RAM area so it gets hit by the front fan. You can add another video card right on top of it as well to do SLI mode.
All in all I am very happy with my purchase. A very hefty price tag, but the quality is outstanding and I think it will last me a very long time with the amount of upgrading I can do. It’ll be a long time before Quad Xeon and up to 16gb of RAM just doesn’t cut it. And surprisingly enough Windows actually detects all 4 processors. They each show up in Task Manager with their own load graphs and all.
When I get home I’ll post about some gaming. Even made some fun videos with CoH. Which was a nice excuse to use Final Cut Pro.