SmoothCreations LanShark Pro Customized Gaming System

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Max Slowik
Kurtis
SmoothCreations
Nov. 12, 2008

Specifications

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Introduction

I was struck by something as soon as I unboxed this Micro-ATX machine. Not the thick, polished, hand-airbrushed designer Plexiglass case, or the cotton, uh, sack the computer came in, and not the cacophony of packing materials that shuttled the materials to my doorstep.

Wait, I'm going to aside on the packaging. There was literally every kind of packing material known to me in that box. There were soft foam bricks, sheets of polystyrene, peanuts of all shapes and flavors, pillowy bubble wrap, lacy bubble wrap, brown paper, and a quantity of plasticized elbow grease. No but yeah, there were bits of foam all over my office. I'm still finding them stuck to the insides of the computer.

While the packing stuff was wonky, it did the work well, if unconventionally. What caught me was the hardware inside the case. I picked it. I literally just built a Micro-ATX gaming machine, and I started with the same processor, video card, and even RAM. Smooth Creations went with a different heatsink, and a lesser hard drive, but it's hard to fault a company for selling a machine that's, at its core, my first pick.

So what I have in my office is the first of the LanSharks--yours won't come in a miasma of peanuts. Mine is a custom build, a little better than the entry-level LanShark Affordable, and priced about $1,700. There are three grades of LanShark, Affordable ($1,344) PRO ($2,537) and Extreme ($3,943), and all can be altered to your needs. They get Nero pre-installed, too. Mine came with a racing wheel and Race Driver: Grid; you can expect yours to come with a Logitech gaming keyboard and mouse set, and if you're a loyal reader here, you can get yours with Far Cry 2.

The Computer

Now, personally, I don't go in for the metal sinew-and-eyeballs Broodling theme, but I tip my hat to the Giger-inspired paint-monkey that delivered it with so much polish. From concept to product, the unsubtle layering of silver grotesquerie wraps around the hardware and showcases it and only it, with a slick internal bezel that conceals cable mess and power wiring. There's more to the design than just looks, with top-notch engineering (and maybe some trial-and-error) that leave no doubts about the quality of construction. And make no mistake, you can always request a different paint job.

The case uses a simple front-to-back airflow system with two 120mm fans. With the cables tucked behind opaque Plexi, there's nothing to bind, misdirect, or obstruct said airflow, so I would describe it as excellent. The heat coming out the power supply is greater than from the CPU heatsink, and the HD 4870 1GB exhausts right out the back, too.

So the tour of the case goes like this: the front face of the machine has two fan openings, each with an SC monogram to prevent digit trauma, and is otherwise undecorated (beyond the paint work). There's one optical drive, LightScribe-ready, and a chromed steel power button. Pressing it should launch something lethal; it's slick. Inside, the layout is fairly strict ATX, with the drives and the PSU at the top, the motherboard and video card underneath. For a less weighty case, this leads to a mass distribution problem but the materials used are so thick that there's no reason to worry. The side panel is a single pane framed on the inside with viscera, and dimly lit in green by the Zalman heatsink's fan, and it, like all the individual parts, is held together with screws, placed well without fault tolerance. The artwork coats the interior and doesn't misalign, period. Even the hard drive bay is finished, extending the ocular presence to every constructed part. Even the feet are cool.

But there's this other, let's call it, an oversight. That sexy (or again, scary, eye of the beholder being what it is) interior bevel is designed for an HD 4870, and only one. If you decide to upgrade to a 4870 X2, or to whatever future card's in store, it had better be the same length or shorter. That's just with the LanShark Affordable, as the other 'Sharks' bevels are cut for multi-GPU configurations--or however you choose to have yours made. I just think they should all be drop-in-ready.

And finally, I question the OS choice. Vista Ultimate, yeah, awesome, but 32-bit? The computer has four gigs of RAM, right? And another gig on the video card. Because 32-bit operating systems are limited to a 4GB address space, this means that Vista can only use 3GB of the available RAM. Again, this is for me only, so you be sure to order yours with x64.

Specifications and Setup

LanShark:

Intel Q9550 Quad Core 2.83GHz
Factory-overclocked to 3GHz (375x8) Silverstone 750W PSU
4GB GSKILL DDR2 950MHz
Diamond Radeon HD 4870 1GB
Seagate 500GB HDD
DFI LanParty DK P45-T2RS
Asus 20x Super-Mega-Multi Meat Combo optical drive with LightScribe
Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit

AMD Quad-Core:

AMD Phenom X4 9850 2.5GHz
Silverstone 1KW PSU
4GB Mushkin DDR2 1066MHz
PNY 9800 GTX 512MB
Western Digital Raptor 150GB
Asus M3N-HT Deluxe
Microsoft Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive
Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit

I went ahead and benchmarked the LanShark against a mainstream, quad-core AMD/ NVIDIA machine; the two are really in different classes, but it's a common alternative and it shows just how advanced the Intel/ ATI combo really is.

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Page 1: Introduction, The Computer, Specifications & Test Setup
Page 2: General Benchmarks
Page 3: Gaming Benchmarks
Page 4: Overclocking, Power and Noise
Page 5: Conclusion

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