Voodoo PC OMEN a121x CrossFire Extreme Gamer PC
Interior Design, Layout & Construction
If the exterior finish and styling of the Voodoo OMEN CrossFire got you all jazzed, the interior will really get your juices flowin'...
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As upstanding Tech Journalists, we strive to remain calm, cool, collected, unbiased and frankly, monotone when it comes to the evaluation of a product. Getting overly enthusiastic about a new article subject can only lead to something we would say is akin to "tunnel vision". That is to say, if you're all excited about something, chances are you're going to view it through a very rosy pair of Ray-Bans. Unfortunately for us, containment wasn't in the cards when we popped the side panel of the OMEN CrossFire. We think we heard the angels (perhaps fallen angels?) singing "ahhhh" above our heads when we got a closer look inside this rig.
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Like our Muscle-Car High School days of old, the OMEN CrossFire was "chromed and braided". You could eat off the engine it's so clean. Voodoo has fashioned custom copper water blocks and tubing onto both the Athlon 64 FX-60 CPU and its dual Radeon X1900 XT GPUs in the OMEN CrossFire. These all hook up to what looks to be a Swiftech radiator and a nicely compact coolant reservoir that tucks up underneath the DVD drive, inside a single 5.25" drive bay. The coolant itself is described by Voodoo as "Purple Voodoo SuperCoolant" but we know better that actually it's made of a special mix of glycol fluids, silicon, and distilled water (thanks to our friends at Voodoo for that tid-bit). The radiator is cooled by two 120mm intake fans in the front of the rig and there is another 120mm exhaust fan in the back of the system.
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We're simply enamored by the custom copper/nylon water blocks that Voodoo designed for the Dual Radeon X1900 XTs in the OMEN CrossFire. Filled with purple Voodoo SuperCoolant and illuminated by a nearby cathode light, they're very much showcase items viewable through the system's side panel window. Tied in with tubing between each other and fed back to the CPU cooling block, they do a nice job of cooling both GPUs and obviously they're completely silent themselves. More on noise levels later.
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The PSU in the OMEN CrossFire is positioned in the bottom rear corner of the case, perched upon a metal grate of its own and tied in with thumbscrews. The PSU is a 650W custom modular Voodoo PC unit that is built for Voodoo by TopPower. Unfortunately for us, we had major issues with this particular PSU and had to have it replaced by Voodoo twice. It turns out TopPower had a bad batch of units where the fan controllers were going bad and then eventually the unit would heat up and ultimately fail. Voodoo was quick to respond with replacements and we were back up and running in no time. Voodoo's excellent reputation for customer service leaves us very little concern with what was essentially an isolated issue, that Voodoo has since purged from their manufacturing lines.
Ending this section on a more positive note, next to the PSU is the OMEN's massively expansive hard drive cage, once again attributed to the impeccable layout of the Lian Li chassis that Voodoo chose to customize for the OMEN CrossFire. Our system had two 400G Hitachi drives installed but there's room for 6 additional drives, 2 in the rack pictured above and another 4 in an adjacent rack in the front of the chassis. Air is pulled in through one of the 120mm SilenX fans over the radiator and is in turn then pumped across the drive array.
All told the Voodoo OMEN CrossFire a121x is a sexy, well-built, well-oiled machine and it simply purrs. If there is one attribute that we would say justifies this system's lofty price tag, we would have to say "build quality" is it. Of course there's also performance to consider, so we'll fire it up next.
