Well it’s been a month since I last posted anything. Did anyone one of the five people who read this blog miss me? Well the wait may be well worth it, if just for this one post. I just received what is one of the more hotly anticipated cases to come out in a while. Futurelooks.com originally previewed this case this past summer at Computex 2008, and now it’s finally made it into our hands. That’s right, I have in my possession an Antec Skeleton, and I’m going to show you the unboxing right here.

I literally just received the case today, so I haven’t had a chance to set it up where I normally take my review photos. That means that for now everything is going to be spread out on my living floor, and some pictures will use the flash. Anyhow, due to the shape of the Antec Skeleton, the box is much more cubic then the average computer case box. It’s also fairly boring to look at, compared to what is inside.

Upon opening the box, I got my first look at the 250mm fan that adorns the top of the Antec Skeleton above the motherboard area. Now I’ve seen some big fans in my day. I have a couple of pictures in my archive of John Chow holding up a 170mm case fan, with that evil glint in his eye. But that is nothing compared to the size of this fan. Hopefully it should do what I would expect such a fan to do, and that is remain quiet while moving a great deal of air.

And here it is, the Antec Skelton, finally and completely freed from it’s packaging. Some have expressed certain concerns over the construction of this case, and rightly so. Many of the "open air" cases I’ve seen have been made mostly of plastic, and as a result may not be able to stand up to the punishment such a case would take. The Antec Skeleton, on the other hand, is mostly steel. It’s really easy to see what parts are made of what material. The black components pictured here are steel, and the gunmetal grey parts are plastic. Overall, this looks to be a very sturdy case that will feature prominently on many a hardware monkey’s bench.

There’s one more concern that people have expressed in the Futurelooks Forums about the Antec Skeleton, and that’s if it’ll accommodate a large CPU heatsink. There’s a gallery of pictures below, with a few more close-ups of the area in question. I have my doubts as to whether a cooler like the Cooler Master Hyper 212 will fit under the little lip around the fan. Unfortunately we’ll have to wait until next week, when the full review is posted, to see what kind of heatsink you’ll need to use with this case. Until then, enjoy the pictures below.

Now taking pot-shots are the throne occupied by the likes of Arctic Silver is nothing new, but I can’t help but help out the underdog. Preliminary testing looks very promising. I’m just waiting for the Arctic Silver 5 I just applied to set up, and I’ll finally have a conclusive comparison. Basically I’ll know whether this stuff is top dog, or just second best.

For updates on what myself and the rest of the Futurelooks.com crew are up to, you can subscribe to our Twitter feeds. Click here for mine, and for the site.

Now as cool as waffle makers that glowed blue would be, this isn’t such a creature. It’s definitely a creature though, if at least in name. From the company known as Wolfking comes the Warrior Xxtreme Gamepad. Stephen Fung sent me the info on this when he was culling together his review list, and it looked intriguing. A little silly, but definitely intriguing. The guiding principle Wolfking has placed behind the Warrior Xxtreme as being the "world’s first 2-in-1 PC gamepad and keyboard." A cursory glance through the instruction manual shows this device seems to be aimed at MMO players and CS junkies. Since I play neither (Team Fortress 2 and Call of Duty 4 are my FPS games of choice), this ought to be interesting.

There’s been so little use of the PCI Express bus beyond the usual suspects found in video cards. It’s really a shame, as the bus offers bandwidth a plenty to devices like drive controllers. I’m looking forward to checking out this card from Asus. The Xonar D2X is a PCIe x1 sound card, and supposedly it sounds just beautiful. Beyond that, it has some interesting bling features. The ports light up in their respective AC97 colours, which just looks cool.

Some of you may remember the HUGE article I wrote about our local LAN party a couple years ago. Well when I heard about this product, I knew that since Fragapalooza was fast approaching it would be a perfect test. This bag is called the Keyboard Quiver, and is from the same company that makes the Dust-Off brand compressed air cans we all know and love. The only thing I really want to know is if it’ll hold the behemoth that is the gen1 Logitech G15 gaming keyboard.

Now we’ve seen a few devices like the Saitek Cyborg Command Unit before. These devices are specialized for the FPS gamer, isolating the key…keys to enhance game play. Or at least that’s how the marketing speak goes. Anyhow, the gist of this is that it has isolated the WASD cluster of keys to make it easier for FPS players. There’s also added benefit for RTS players, as there’s a hat swicth for moving about the map. This device might actually stack up better than the Wolfking above.

Finally we end with something I haven’t seen in retail for a long time; a slot fan. The Vizo Propeller System Cooler is a slot mounted blower fan that can exhaust excess air from within you case. With summer fast approaching in my area, things will start heating up. Hopefully the idea of the slot fan isn’t dead, and this device can make some dent in the temperatures of my test rig.

Fresh off the FedEx truck is Alienware’s latest update to their Area-51 7500 series of performance systems. I’ve been waiting for this system since CES 2007. Unfortunately Alienware didn’t want to ship it out due to some driver immaturity and a squable between the parties responsible. Those issues have yet to be cleared up, but Alienware still decided to send the system. This rig is now sitting on my test bench, just waiting to be poked and prodded in the most interesting ways.

This latest iteration comes bundled with you choice of Windows Vista flavour, DX10 compatible video card, top of the line CPU, and a host of customizations you expect from a boutique OEM like Alienware. The system shipped out to me was spec’ed out with the following.

• Intel® Core™ 2 Extreme QX6700 2.66GHz 8MB Cache 1066MHz FSB – Overclocked to 3.2GHz
• Windows® Vista Ultimate
• Alienware® P2 Chassis – Space Black
• AlienFX™ System Lighting – Astral Blue
• EVGA NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI Motherboard
• 2GB Low Latency DDR2 Performance SDRAM at 800MHz – 2 x 1024MB
• Western Digital Raptor 150GB Serial ATA 1.5Gb/s 10,000 RPM Hard Drive (x2 in RAID0)
• NEC 18X Dual Layer DVD±RW/CD-RW Burner w/ Nero Software
• EVGA NVIDIA® GeForce™ 8800 GTX 768MB PCIe Video Card
• Alienware® 700W Power Suppl
• Creative Sound Blaster® X-Fi™ XtremeGamer High Definition 7.1 Audio
• Logitech® G15 Gaming Keyboard
• Logitech® G5 Laser Gaming Mouse
• Free Alienware® T-Shirt – White

If you’re wondering why I’ve shown such a liberal use of “trademark” and “registered” symbols, well it wasn’t my fault. I stole these specs straight off the Alienware site when I priced out what I received using their online quote system.

If you’re wondering, the whole package you see above comes to $5,119.00 USD. Converted into loonies and toonies (the Canadian dollar for those not familiar with the local vernacular), that comes out to about $5,710 CDN depending on what day of the week it is (also known as the exchange rate).

Needless to say this system is sitting on my bench running as we speak…er….type. Once I clear up a few reviews for The Tech Zone, we’ll get down to some benchmarks. I’m also going to do some comparison screenshots to see how DX10 games look on DX10 hardware, verus my old DX9 SLI rig. Stay tuned.