Thermaltake has been around for quite a while now; ever since the first Xaser chassis came out, people knew where to look first if they fancied extreme case designs that come in big size. Each of the high-end brands from today needs to have a flagship chassis that comes with the most and best features available. Previously the Xaser series filled this gap for Thermaltake, but today Xaser is more like a normal mid tower. Spedo (Ed: yes, that's Spedo and not Speedo -- trademarks, you know) is the new lion in the cage and we will be examining it today to see how it compares to the other towers we have tested.

The Spedo with the Advanced Package has a massive appearance and an awful lot of drive bays, including all the necessary covers for the drive bays. There are twelve bays/covers but Thermaltake still manages to keep the design simple and sleek. It looks similar to the previously examined Cosmos S with this pseudo-robot style derived from science-fiction movies. One of the features is A.T.C.3 (Advanced Thermal Chamber), a system that is supposed to separate the different cooling zones within the PC. Another feature is C.R.M.3 (Cable Routing Management) which is actually really helpful.

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We've looked at a number of systems here at AnandTech, and Velocity Micro has always been on our "to-do" list based on their popularity and prevalence in the market. The guys from Virginia sent one of their new Edge Z55 systems our way with a Core i7-940 to put through our review cycle. How does it hold up? As this is our first time looking at Velocity Micro, we'll look at the company themselves, and then try to answer that question. Worth note is that this is also our first Core i7 system review, so we may see some teething problems with the brand new technology.

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Today we are going to discuss three system cases and their modifications from the mainstream price segment from such popular brands as HEC, Gigabyte and Raidmax. Hopefully our article will help you make your choice.

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Cooling solutions employing Heat-pipe Direct Touch technology keep evolving and improving their efficiency. Today we are going to discuss three new solutions from Xigmatek and OCZ Technology.

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We visited many power supply companies during the past year, and many of them have commented, "the power supply market is dead -- there's nothing new that can be done to attract more customers." That's not entirely wrong, as PSUs are one of the components most people only think about when their old unit sales, or when building a new system. However, it's still important for power supply companies to research new technologies and features, especially if they want to stand out from the crowd. The most recent feature to make its way onto the scene is DC-to-DC technology, with several companies now sporting high-end PSUs that use it. For example, we have the previously tested Enermax Revolution 85+, Silverstone's Zeus 1200W, and Antec's Signature Series.

DC-to-DC technology is nothing revolutionary, as power supplies have always had 3.3V and 5V rails; the difference is simply that instead of taking these directly from the transformer, these rails now split off from the 12V rail -- hence, DC-to-DC. Like other companies, Seasonic has worked on implementing this technology, but they didn't want to rush the new products to market. According to Seasonic representatives, they didn't want to have end-users beta testing the technology, instead waiting until their new PSUs were truly ready for public consumption.

Today we are looking at the long anticipated M12D series, which of course features DC-to-DC technology. We want to see if there's actually difference between Seasonic's offering and the other power supplies that use this tech. Enermax already showed us that they can reach 90% efficiency with a DC-to-DC PSU, so we want to see if Seasonic can match that achievement. There's also more to building a quality power supply than raw efficiency of course, as we discussed recently, but it is worth mentioning that Seasonic has achieved 80 Plus Silver certification.

The outward appearance of the new M12D series doesn't break new ground, with Seasonic once again using their standard black design. The casing is 160 mm long, which is slightly longer than usual, but Seasonic has built PSUs for other companies that use a longer casing (i.e. PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750 Quad). Besides the DC-to-DC technology, Seasonic includes a few other interesting features, including a custom Sanyo Denki fan. The PSUs are also supposed to have very tight voltage regulation in the future only Japanese manufactured capacitors. The M12D series starts at 750W and 850W, which is definitely at the high end of what most users need. We know in the past Seasonic has tended to focus on more reasonable wattages, so hopefully we will see some of the wattage models in the future.

We are testing the 850W model today, which comes with two 12V rails each rated at 40A. Again, this isn't remarkably different from other Seasonic PSUs, but it does give users plenty of juice on each rail even with sudden large peak loads. The 3.3V rail is rated at 24A and 5V rail is 30A, both of which are fine for modern systems.

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