Plenty of companies are happy to piece together a gaming PC using off the shelf components, but very few build their cases from scratch. That's what Digital Storm claims it has done with the Aventum, a powder-coated, anodized aluminum and steel chassis filled with the latest PC gaming components and some pretty snazzy cooling solutions to go with them. "It's the first time a boutique builder such as us has created a high performance PC to our own specifications," CMO Harjit Chana told us, "we designed everything down to the custom control module circuit board."
Not only does the massive case have the company's proprietary "Cryo-TEC" liquid cooling system, which allegedly sends sub-zero liquid to remove heat from the CPU, but it removes heat from that liquid with three hefty 420mm radiators, each with three large 140mm fans, sucking in cool air from either side of the case and channeling it out the back. There's space for four 3.5-inch hard drives and two 2.5-inch drives in a removable cage, with a pair of dedicated cooling fans of their own, and you can regulate five independent thermal zones in the chassis thanks to discrete temperature probes. There's even an LCD display built into the side of the case to monitor cooling and a Windows client to control all 13 fans.
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Obviously, this isn't a bang for the buck computer, starting at $3,859 for even the entry-level model, but there's some serious potential if you've got the cash. While the baseline version comes with a Intel Core i7-2700K CPU, 16GB of RAM, a GeForce GTX 680 GPU, a 120GB SSD and 1TB HDD, an ASUS P8Z68-V Pro motherboard, a DVD burner, and a 1050W Corsair power supply, $7,856 can buy you dual hexacore Intel Xeon E5-2630 CPUs with 32GB of ECC RAM on an EVGA Classified SR-X motherboard, three GeForce GTX 680s in a triple-SLI configuration, and 1500 watts of power. Unless you're feeling spendy, you might want to wait: Digital Storm tells us the entry-level Aventum will upgrade to Intel's Ivy Bridge chips in April.