Gigabyte's latest gaming tower case is the award winning Aurora 3D and Fastek have specified this as the base for the system. It's numerous features include:

• Extended body for 10% more space
  
• High-end brushed aluminum panel and ultra light body
• Multi-functional window(steel mesh-vent; acrylic-transparent)
  
• Enhanced strength rear plate with nickel coating
  
• Dual security locks(front and side panel), protect value system hardware
  
• Built-in one blue LED illumined silent intake fan with filter
  
• Built-in two blue LED illumined silent exhaust fans
  
• Support liquid cooling system with pre-modified dual tube outlets
  
• Patent pending customized light beam projector

It's a great case and perfect for impressing friends and turning heads at LAN party events. It looks stylish but more importantly it provides plenty of room for expansion as your system needs change.

Beating away at the heart of the system is a 2.4Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. This helps keep the system cost down while still offering fantastic performance. The ability of these chips to overclock to massive speeds in excess of Intel's current flagship offerings of 2.93GHz is well documented and we are happy to report that this system was no exception. With a quick tweak of the bios to raise the front side bus, we were able to ramp the processor up to 3GHz. We didn't even have to raise the voltage! If you are feeling a little more daring you also be happy to know that a bump in Vcore allowed the system to happily chug away in Prime95 (a program designed to stress your system to the max) at 3.4Ghz. While overclocking is never officially supported, you'll be happy to know that the team at Fastek are all overclocking enthusiasts and very supportive of this dark art, offering advice and help should you wish to give it a go.

The maths muscle is backed up by OCZ 2GB DDR2 900 CL5.0 Dual Channel Special Ops Edition Memory. OCZ are our current favourite choice of memory for any system and we gave a big thumbs up when we saw this included. We recently reviewed the Gigabyte DQ6 motherboard and found it to be an excellent feature rich platform with all solid capitor design for stability and a silent heat pipe cooling system for a quiet working environment. It's a great choice offering plenty of room for expansion in the future and even the possibility of configuring two 8800GTX graphics cards in SLI mode!

You might think a 7,200 rpm hard drive would be enough for any system but not Fastek. They've bundled in a top of the range Western Digital 150Gb 10,000RPM RAPTOR X Hard Drive to make sure the operating system and applications zip along at break neck speed. It's a really nice touch and the perfect partner for the rest of the high end components. A final mention goes out to the internal 5 in 1 card reader which is great for digital cameras and multimedia devices.

Here's a rundown of the full package.

Build contents include:

• Gigabyte Aurora 3D 570 gaming case
• Intel Pentium Core 2 Duo Conroe E6700 LGA775 2.67GHz CPU
• OCZ 2GB DDR2 900 CL5.0 Dual Channel Special Ops Edition Memory
• Gigabyte Socket 965 GA-965P-DQ6 Motherboard
• Asus QuieTrack ATA-100 16x DVD-ROM Drive
• Gigabyte 3D Rocket II Cooler
• Gigabyte GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB DDR3 Graphics Card
• Western Digital 150Gb 10,000RPM RAPTOR X Hard Drive
• Hiper HPU-4M730 670W PC Power Supply
• Internal 53in1 Card Reader
• One year back to base warranty
  

Technical Specifications of the case are as follows:

• Dimension 205 x 522 x 570 mm (W x H x D)
• Front bezel Material Aluminum 
• Color Silver / Black 
• Side Panel Multi-functional window (steel mesh-vent; acrylic-transparent) 
• Body Material Aluminum 
• Net Weight 8 kg 
• 5.25" drive bay (External) 5 
• 3.5" drive bay (External) 2 
• 3.5" drive bay (Internal) 5 
• Expansion Slot 7 
• Compatible Mother board ATX / Micro ATX 
• System Fan(front) 120 mm silent LED fan x 1 
• System Fan (rear) 120 mm silent LED fans x 2 
• I / O Ports USB 2.0 x 2 / IEEE 1394 x 1 / HD-AC97 audio x 1 set
  

Our system came with an optional Coolermaster Musketeer fan and temperature controller that provided a bit of bling to the front of case. Is there anything we would change or add? Perhaps we are being picky but we would have liked to have seen an OCZ power supply instead of the Hiper 580w. Hiper make decent psu's but this is a Rolls Royce system and as such we think it should have a top end power supply to match. We'd also like to see the inclusion of some sort of dvd writer instead of a standard dvd rom drive and a Creative Labs X-FI soundcard to replace the onboard sound for the ultimate in surround sound action. No doubt these extras would push the price up but worth the extra cost when purchasing a system such as this.

In The Labs

Predictably the Fastek system chewed through benchmarks like a steroid fueled body builder eating a can of tuna. The system ships without any monitor so you can take your pick of screens to suit your budget. We hooked the Fastek Aurora 3D up to our office Apple 30" cinema display and dropped to our knees to drool at the ability to run all games at maximum resolution with 4xAA and 16xAF. F.E.A.R at 2048x1536 produced frame rates as high as 200+ with every graphical feature turned on. Even Oblivion with HDR lighting and maximum resolution couldn't trouble the Fastek Aurora. 3DMark 2006 produced a 10,000+ score at default settings and Super PI completed the 1M test in a little over 18 secs. Suffice to say, you're paying for a system that will play any current game at maximum resolution, with all the eyecandy turned on, at buttery smooth frame rates. The Fastek rig delivers big time and shows that it is an utterly formidable machine.

Unfortunately, there aren't any games that can really test the full power of the Fastek system as Microsoft Vista and Direct X10 games still aren't available. It'll be another month or so before Vista ships to consumers and a few months after that before we see next generation games taking advantage of the new operating system. If you're wondering what the be deal is about Direct x10, take a look at this clip of Crysis - a next generation game in development by the makers of Far Cry and one of the first to support Direct x10.


Fastek have produced a dream PC with the Gigabyte 3D Aurora system. Top of the range parts from the Gigabyte stable combined with carefully selected high performance components, offer mind boggling levels of performance. The whole package provides a fantastic platform for anybody looking for a sleek, stylish and future proof gaming and multimedia system. Direct x10 and Vista ready support out of the box means it's well future proof and should provide many years of happy fragging. Professional construction, neat cabling and a sensible layout impressed our lab team no end.

Ultimate gaming on a PC doesn't come cheap these days and for just under £1600, you'll still have to fork out extra money for a decent monitor to do it justice. However with the anti-aliasing turned on and the monitor resolutions off the scale, games will look all kinds of gorgeous for years to come. Top stuff.