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HighSpeedPC Tech Station
Testing
Testing the HighSpeedPC Tech Station was really just using it to support the hardware that I was testing. Since that hardware was motherboards, I spent a good deal of time with it and swapped boards quite a few times. The neoprene pad on the top does a good job of keeping the hardware from sliding around. Pulling the power and IDE cables around didn't cause the drive or power supply to move any. There isn't a whole lot of room on the top of the Tech Station to put things so if you have more than just a power supply and an optical drive, you will have to stack things. I cut the foam pad from one of the motherboard boxes and taped it to the top of my DVD drive to put the floppy drive on. This was necessary as my floppy drive has exposed components on the bottom and I didn't want to let the magic smoke out if it shorted on the DVD drive case. Cabling is rather hard to manage without anything to tie cables to. Cables to and from the motherboard simply hang down between the top plate and the bottom. You can't hold anything against HighSpeedPC for this however, it's pretty much just the nature of the beast. Assuming you had the proper tools to do so, you could make custom length cables to get rid of some slack. I went with the "turn it so you can't see them' method of cable management. (One thing worth mentioning is that using a modular power supply such as the Enermax Liberty or Antec NeoPower will help with cable management, as you will only need to manage the cables that you, well, need. - Ed.)  The purpose of the Tech Station is to facilitate easy swapping of hardware. If you are swapping out power supplies or optical drives frequently, it's pretty simple to do. You just unplug the cables, pull the optical drive off the top plate and plunk your new drive down. But I was testing motherboards when using the Tech Station which is a different beast altogether. You don't just lift the board out and throw a new one in; it's not quite that easy for a couple of reasons. The heatsink I used during my testing was the Zalman CNPS7000-Cu. This heatsink must be screwed into place rather than spring-clipped. Screwing the heatsink down while the motherboard is in the Tech Station isn't going to happen as there isn't enough clearance for a screwdriver between the plates. So that has to be added while the board is out of the Tech Station. The video card, or any add-in card really, will also present a problem when using the Tech Station. It is possible to put the card in place while the board is in the Tech Station, but it's somewhat awkward as you have to enter from the side of the Tech Station, be under the hard-drive rack but over the other slots. It's a bit of a balancing act and hard to get both hands in to help line things up. There's also the little problem of a complete lack of support under the middle of the board. All the rubber feet that are used for standoffs are at the outer edges of the board. Without any support in the middle of the board, when you press cards into place there's a good deal of flex in the middle of the board. This also creates problems for "short' boards like the BFG nForce4 Ultra motherboard. Without middle supports for the board, the board lays at an angle with only the CPU heatsink bracket frame underneath to support things.   So you can put add-in cards on the motherboard after it's in the Tech Station and risk over-flexing of the motherboard or you put add-in cards on the motherboard and then place the whole assembly into the Tech Station which is quite a balancing act. I've done both a few times and am not happy with either approach; there is simply too much risk of damaging the hardware in both scenarios. Logically, the fix for this problem is simple. The motherboard and associated components should be on top of the Tech Station and the drives and power supply should be on the bottom. Then add a middle row of rubber feet to support the center of the board to keep it from flexing. Now, this has its own set of problems, for example, how do you support the add-in cards on top? And..umm..Ok so maybe it's just one problem.
Page 1: Introduction & First Impressions
Page 2: Putting it Together Page 3: Testing Page 4: Conclusion 
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