Smooth Creations was established in 1999 by Jim Saling. Originally supplying airbrushed cases for some gamer-orientated system builders such as Alienware, Smooth Creations now offers its own line of high performance desktops, and 'SmoothBook' notebooks.

Without doubt the most notable feature of their product line-up is the high-quality airbrushed cases they offer; and these cases are filled with some of the quickest components available today.

Mind you that for their most simple PC's you need to cough up well of a grand, and their most exquisite systems ... can set you back 8000 USD. This is not at all targeted at the DIY budget conscience market at all, please bare that in mind.

Today you guys all can get on the Guru Bus, driving you towards the Crossfire campus.

The PC that Smooth Creations shipped out is one of their pre-designed run of the mill PCs, as I have actually run into it on a couple of exhibitions already.

Now I say run of the mill here, but for them it's a fairly low-end specced PC as typically they do much more extreme things with water-coolign and design. Fact however was that for this PC to be reviewed, it had the be flown out from the USA towards the Netherlands. And with water-cooling ...  that's a tricky thing to do. So I can only assume that was the reason for Smooth Creations to ship out a fairly 'economical' PC to one of the worlds most high-end targeted enthusiast websites.

We we got the more regular stuff as this rig is based on air-cooling with everything. Now the specifications for this "run of the mill PC" are still very high end and consist of the following items:

Mother board	Foxconn P45-S
Graphics	DiamondMM Radeon HD 4870 (x2 CrossfireX)
Memory	G.Skill DDR2 2x2GB PC6400 6-6-6-18
Processor	Intel QX9650
Power Supply	CoolerMaster 1000W
HDD	Western Digital 1TB Green
DVD	Lite-on Blu-Ray/DVD
CPU Cooler	Zalman CNPS 9700 LED
OS	Windows Vista ultimate 32-bit
Chassis	VW Bus painted on Coolermaster 832 Stacker

As you can see fairly nice components, though the 'green' WD 1TB HDD is too slow for my taste. In my opinion at this price level we should see a boot drive based on a fast WD Raptor and then the 1TB drive for generic storage.

Second curiosity is the choice in memory. GSkill offer very nice memory. They inserted two bars of 2GB. However it's rated at PC6400. 6400/8= 800 MHz DDR2 memory ? And then the timings .. 6-6-6-18. hmm, what to make of it. Luckily enough the memory is pretty snazzy fast as we found out during our tests -- yet at an all-time low 30 USD per 2 GB stick these days .. something a little higher specced would have had my preference.

All parts are pre-installed into the PC. The chassis obviously was airbrushed, inside and out into very rich detail. A nice small side-note is that typically the PC can be purchased as a set, and comes along with Logitech keyboard, mouse, speaker system and even LCD. These are then powder-coated in the same color schema as well, very cool.

The one thing that was not pre-installed was a Zalman CPU Cooler as during transport ... it might move and thus damage something. The CPU and mount where already installed though, so it's a matter of applying a little thermal paste and screw the cooler secure with two screws. Anyway, we have everything sorted out even Windows Vista Ultimate is installed for us. All we need to do is plug our external hardware to the PC and give her some juice.

Let's go into he photo-shoot and have a peek how cool the rig looks. After that we'll fire off a couple of benchmarks at the system to see how well it performs in both a work environment and of course .. gaming.