I bought this case for a custom rig that I am building for myself, and from the time I received it in the mail, I knew that this was an ideal case for my build. At first I wanted the much bigger Armor full tower version, but because of price, weight and space issues, I decided that a mid-tower case was probably better for someone like me who lugs his computer around everywhere. Apart from being a very renown product, with many positive reviews like this one everywhere on the internet, it also comes from Thermaltake, an authority in everything that concerns cases and cooling. So lets take a look that this beauty.

Finally, after two and half weeks of waiting, I finally received the chassis components for this build: a Thermaltake Armor Jr. in black for the case, and an Ultra X-Finity 600w power supply unit.

Barely 12 hour after purchasing my motherboard, I have now purchased my RAM, two modules of pair-matched 1GB Corsair XMS2 PC6400, for a total of 2 gigs of memory. I know my motherboard supports up to PC2 9600, but for the budget I had for this rig, I just couldn’t spend any more money than this. I had the intention to buy the Dominator XMS3 sticks from Corsair, which are as we all know the best and probably most expensive sticks out there, but after seeing that an article from a French Hardware Magazine dating from December 2006 outfitted their “dream rig” with PC 5300, I lolled and decided that maybe 800 mhz RAM wasn’t that bad. Specially considering the awesome, kick ass timings: 5-5-5-15 out of the box, and 4-4-4-12 with EPP on a compatible motherboard (ie: the one I just bought) or with a little bit of overclocking.

One of the bigger components is now purchased: the motherboard. Originally, one my very first dream PC post, I had talked about going the EVGA route, but after a so-so comment by a friend on the concerned brand, I decided on a dime to ditch the whole EVGA thing and buy an XFX mobo, which despite being 30 dollars more expensive had a lesser 680i LT chipset, but was supposed to be of bulletproof quality. Later, after knowing that many homies from DIC used and greatly praised their EVGA components, I decided that their opinions, forged from usage and not rumor, was probably worth more. Under their encouragements, I purchased this 680i SE SLI motherboard. Bascially, it has everything that I need: the kickass 680i chipset, high definition audio, SLI compatibility, and a very reasonable price, at under 230 $CAD shipped.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been having what I call end of summer blues; you know, when you know that school is very close, and theres is still a part of the summer, but you don’t know what to do with it. The symptoms include oversleeping, lack of interest in topics that previously made me go gaga, and never knowing what to do, might it be on or off the computer. Hell, even a game which is supposed to be addictive like World of Warcraft now seems boring. I just had to create some work for myself, something to distract myself until the school year starts, where I would dive very deep into my CCNA course which promises to be very interesting. Of course, I do have on very exciting hardware project underway, Fr0stByte, but since I ordered everything on ebay, I have to wait at least 14 days for paypal and UPS to do it’s magic, and that’s 14 days of boredom. So what if I worked with what I already have… Stares at sister’s PC… excellent…