TECH MAKES IT TICK FORMER TECH HEAD AND DEPUTY ED BENNETT RING (2003 – 2006) IS ALL ABOUT THE HARDWARE, JUST AS EVERY TRUE PC GAMER IS.
The Dremel in my hand whirs to life, set to work cutting a large rectangular window through the thick steel side of the beige PC case. Two more holes are gouged out of the top, becoming the new home for 80mm fans to extract the heat caused by the overclocked CPU within. Once the metalwork is complete, I spray a coat of primer, then two of satin black, and my ugly monstrosity has become a black Obelisk of Awesome. The final touch is the installation of a piece of Perspex, hewn into shape with the sharp teeth of my handsaw, lined with an RGB strip posted from a boutique shop in Taiwan. A week after the beige case arrives, and my case mod is done, ready to haul to a LAN party along with my impressively large 21” 1600 x 1200 Sony CRT monitor. Carefully strapped with seatbelts into the back of the car, surrounded by pillows to ensure everything arrives intact, it's a far-cry from the mass-produced, laser-cut, LED-festooned cases of 2023. But in this year of our Lord Gabe, 2002, it's like showing up to a Corolla dealership in a Lambo.
FOR THE LOVE OF THE BOX
It's not merely my custom-made case that inspires envy from the folks I'll be shooting in Counter-Strike over the next 24 hours, surviving on a well-balanced diet of Red Bull and Skittles to stave off sleep. The top-tier components within, which I'm lucky enough to receive early thanks to my role as PC PowerPlay's hardware reviewer/ deputy editor, are enough to make any 486 DX-100 owner weep. Intel’ brand-new Pentium 4 2.53B resides in the hot-seat after wrestling AMD's mighty Athlon XP from its top spot as the gaming CPU of choice, its powerful single core purring along with a blazing 3GHz overclock, paired with a staggering 512MB of DDR SDRAM. If I inhale hard enough, I can still smell the freshly minted PCB of…
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PC Powerplay (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 300
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