13 -Final words | Conclusion

The Verdict

So what we reviewed today, was in the eyes of Smooth Creations, likely a little less spectacular than some of the other reviews you have seen on the web. Face it, with systems like these .. you want water-cooling to cool it to the maximum and pimp things up extensively. Shiny and glowy stuff.

I'll summarize my experiences up as a good number of things where below par with this build. At Smooth Creations you pay top dollar for your rig, and well ..  you can demand quality as that's what you pay for and nothing less.

Smooth Creations absolutely goofed up by fitting in two DiamondMM Radeon 4870 cards that physically can't work together. Ouch ...

The word back from Smooth Creations was that this system had been used for three days at an NVIDIA event (had to be NVISION, we where there btw) yet somewhere down the line of shipping this product to us, an employee inserted a second card and apparently didn't match it up. You know, it is one of these things that can happen, for whatever reason he did not check to see if the cards would work together at all. Granted, at this price and build level that just may not happen. Considering we've never received or seen any similar complaints on the web regarding issues like these, we'll consider this was an isolated problem. Mistakes do happen and hey ... someone goofed up there.

However my biggest complaint has to be the noise level .... it really is a little bizarre that you cannot hear the Radeon HD 4870 cards at all, just because the CPU and rear fan create more noise. This is something that Smooth Creations has to deal with, that's unacceptable period. A 15 USD fan controller would have solved it. This has been reported back to Smooth creations and they have been very open to listen to suggestions. I'm confident they'll look into this and fix it in future air-cooled models.

Two other recommendations from my side would be, make the boot drive at standard a fast volume drive, a WD Raptor would be the way to go here. Memory wise the 4GB at standard is excellent, yet spice it up a little with higher frequency memory or faster timings. Memory, especially DDR2, is dirt cheap these days.

But hey, with that out of the way .. one thing I do not want this conclusion to be is negative. Once you unpack (the well packaged) system, the first thing that's kick in is the x-factor. These PC's just look amazing and I have never seen a system look so bad-ass as what Smooth creations can deliver. It really is breathtaking. The key of the success is the combination of good and fast hardware components combined with that kickass airbrushed spray-paint on the chassis.

What also was done really well is the cable management. I have built a lot of systems here for Guru3D.com and trust me, good cable management is a hard thing to accomplish. Those of you who did a cable management job at the level you have been able to see today, you guys know and feel the agony of accomplishing that. The idea behind cable management is simple .. you don't want them to be visible. It gives the PC that crisp and clean look and will make other components stand out. This PC would get 10 out of 10 points for that, it's that good.

You guys will obviously throw the keyword money in my face, sure, any component used in this PC you can pickup cheaper in e-tail, but that's not what this is about. PCs like these are for a select group of end-users who do not want to build their PC yet have plenty money to spend on a high quality design PC. High quality design, by far it is the most important aspect of these pre-built Smooth creation PC's. And that on its term boils down back to the paintjob. Each Chassis comes with a airbrushed design, and you can tell instantly, that's craftsmanship. Smooth Creations has some very experienced painters on their staff, for which I have nothing other than respect. Nothing I have ever seen comes even remotely close to what these guys do.

And that's where I'm closing this review. Excellent looks, fantastic attention to detail, a really good and fast overall PC and gaming experience. You'll drown your wallet, but love your PC. The issues we have had ... well it would not be fair to had have left them out, we need to write objective reviews and as such we report them. But considering the raving reviews out on the web based on other systems from Smooth Creations, I'd like to think that our situation was isolated and we received a rushed out PC that was just returned from an exhibition.

Perhaps in a future we'll be able to bring you a review praising Smooth creation PCs into heaven .. as that's where custom designs PCs like tested today belong, as this is H to the T signing off on pimping that PC.

You can give Smooth Creations a visit right here.

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