Modders take over Cooler Master booth

THE PERFECT ANTIDOTE for cold, wet, German weather is getting to peer inside the bowels of a beautifully-modded, exceptionally-crafted chassis, which is where Coooler Master came in.

The INQ had the good fortune of running into Tom Portsmouth of Snailmods and Paul Edwards of Coolercases at a Zotac booth party and we were invited to take an intimate look at the pair's artistic creations the following day.

Arriving at the Cooler Master booth after yet another breakfast of fried sausage, the mods were a sight for sore, tired eyes.

Tom's set-up, emitting an eery green glow and sporting his little boy's skeleton toy immediately caught our interest. Dubbed "Carbon Overclock", the new CoolerMaster ATCS 840 chassis housed a tri-loop system using the world's first carbon waterblock (usually made of copper).

The first cooling system was hooked up to the 360 radiator at the top of the case, cooling just the CPU whilst the second loop took care of the chipsets and memory. At the bottom of the rig, the third cooling system consisted of two 120 radiators sucking cool air through the front and expelling it from the sides.

The rig also boasted two reasonable ATI 4870 graphics cards from Powercolor and sported a 775Q 6600 quad-core processor with a couple of Raptor hard drives. The  setup also used two Cooler Master 'Aquagate Max' coolers and the latest Cooler Master 1250 Watt power supply.

On the front of the case, a small inbuilt screen was playing a video showing off some pretty impressive motorcycle stunt-ery, which Tom, whose second passion is motorcylces, said were some of his mates showing off.

Tom told the INQ he's been working night shifts for seven weeks in the run-up to CeBit to get his mod finished, and even then it had been a race against time, with the finishing touches only being applied at 3am on the night before the show.

"There are still a few bits need tidying up," said Tom eyeing his creation critically, noting he had had some paintwork problems with it which had kept him on the powerpolisher until all hours. But on close inspection, we had no clue what flaws he was referring to. It looked truly spectacular in its craftsmanship.

Quality build, however, doesn't come cheap. "The whole rig is probably worth two, three, four K, depending on where you go with it", Tom told us.

Next, we took a sneak peak at Paul's red and black, chrome-grated rig, also built into the the attractive looking shell of the ATCS 840 chassis. The setup certainly didn't cut any corners when it came to hardware, either, with the dual loop cooling system hooked up to a hand picked Intel Core i7 Smackover board and two of the only three Zotac watercooled GTX 295s in Europe.

Paul had also managed to secure himself a couple of OCZ solid state drives (SSDs) and six gigs of super fast memory on triple channel, so his 50's juke box, Art deco style mod wasn't just incredibly good looking, it was also hardware on the bleeding edge.

In fact, we liked both mods so much, we even filmed them for you, so stay tuned and we'll be beaming the footage to your PC any day now. µ