Page 4 -- Candle in the Wind
Taking off the side panel, we can see just how compact and cramped the Firestorm is. Of course, the dominating object is the PSU taking up most of the interior space.
Below the PSU is a bracket. This is actually a floppy disk tray.
Unscrewing the tiny screws and flipping the tray down reveals the Patriot Torqx SSD drive. Ah, sweet SSD love. Were probably a decade or so out from having unified memory in PC's. Just imagine several terabytes of contiguous, non-volatile RAM!
The bottom of the case actually has two HDD mounts, one being populated by the WD 2TB drive. This HDD tray is also removable.
You can see the BFG Tech GTX285 video card below the PSU, attached by a rather non removable bracket. It seems that to get at the CPU and memory, you need to remove both the PSU and the video card in a puzzle-like fashion.
However, the front opens up to reveal the 140mm fans and dust covers. These are mounted to a removable plastic tray. Silverstone recommends cleaning the fan filters once a month, and I agree. I had the Firestorm on for about 2 weeks and the filters were already pretty dusty.
The Silverstone 1KW PSU is nicely modular, with just the right amount of cables attached. A modular PSU is a must-have in a case this small since theres really no space to put any slack wires. I also appreciate the wiring job SmoothCreations do with their machines. Its just so neat and tidy.
But theres six gigs of fast Patriot DDR3 1333LL modules installed. These run at 7-7-7-21 at 1333 MHz, which is quite fast. These put the storm in Firestorm, I do believe. DDR3 usually has high latency, but fast bandwidth, so having lower latency is excellent for just about any application.
And finally, here's the CPU cooler, a heatpipe design that relies on the PSU to suck the heat out. Edit: We're pretty bitter about this setup, and we're informed that SC has updated the Firestorm so you won't see this heatsink in production. We'll find out a little bit later how effective this setup is. On to the benchmarks!
