SmoothCreations Neptune Xtreme Machine - Page 4 -- Even More Analysis

More photography

There's lots of little details, as I've mentioned, and I want to show them to you because SmoothCreations did such a good job on the Netpune that if you were to build something like it yourself, it's worth seeing how they did it.

The ASUS Rampage II Extreme backplane.  Not a whole lot going on here, and nary a serial or parallel port.  While I'm not reviewing the Rampage II, you do get a firewire port, 6 USB, eSATA, two gigabit LAN ports, and a button to clear the CMOS.  That button is a lot more handy than diving into the case to find where the jumper is, that's for sure. 

This is better, two GTX280s and the X-Fi.  Because of the double-wide video cards, all you get is the far right PCIe 8x slot for add-in cards.  You could add a third video card, for better benchmark numbers I suppose, but it would be a tight fit.  Aside from that, the Rampage II has pretty much all you need in terms of peripherals.

And the Blu-ray and DVD/RW drives:

Paging Dr. No, please come to the launch bay.  I did play some DVDs, but sadly didn't have any Blu-Ray discs on hand to try.  Not that it would have mattered, I didn't have a HDCP compatible monitor on hand, either.  Sucks.  SmoothCreations included the BD edition of PowerDVD with their Vista installation.

The paint job is intriguing.  The case comes originally clear and SmoothCreations applied their painting wizardry to it.  Nobody rattle-canned anything on this case.  Check out the edges, see if you notice anything odd.

One corner is actually 3D, the inside edge is not, it's just painted to look like a beveled edge complete with shadows.  Nice!  There's a few pictures where it's perfect, but see if you can spot the ones that don't.

Let's pop the cover and take a look at the inside the Neptune with excruciating detail.