Internals

Next, let's slip off the system's side panel, and take a look over the components that reside within it.

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Kudos to MESH for keeping everything very neat and tidy within the system here, with all of the cabling pretty well routed.  That aside, it's hard not to drool a little over what we find within the Slayer Elemental - There's plenty of nice hardware for us to admire here.

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Looking at the back of the system, we can see how cleanly all of those cables have been routed and tied up - Again, good work MESH for keeping things neat.  From here, we can also see that the rear of the Thermaltake chassis has provision for reaching the CPU cooler's mounting plate without removing the motherboard, which is always nice to know in case of a cooler upgrade (although a slightly larger "window" to work with would have been nice).

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ASUS' M4A79T Deluxe stands proud as the motherboard of choice for this system, sporting an AMD790FX chipset complete with full-on CrossFireX support and, of course, an AM3 CPU Socket with DDR3 support.

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Akasa provides the power supply for our sample, with a 1000 Watt rated non-modular unit utilised by this system.

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HIS provides the 1GB Radeon HD 4890 that powers the graphical capabilities of the Slayer Elemental - This is clocked at reference speeds while using AMD's reference cooling solution.

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The 4GB of DDR3 memory used by the Elemental comes from OCZ, sporting a pair of 1333MHz capable modules complete with easy-carry handles.  Okay, okay, they're head spreaders... Same difference.

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We've already looked at CoolIT's Domino ALC CPU cooler in its own right in the past, and most impressive it is too - This unit is put to good use here cooling our Black Edition CPU via liquid cooling, and exhausting any hot air from the rear of the chassis.

Of course, the Domino's control unit, complete with LED readout, is rather wasted on a system without a side-panel window, but c'est la vie.  We also noted that this unit was set to run at its loudest, highest performance level out of the box, which can make for a pretty noisy system in all honesty - You may well want to pop the side panel of your Elemental system to turn down the fan speed level if noise is an issue to you and you pick up this PC.

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One of our major grips about the Slayer Elemental was going to be its choice of primary storage device - While there can be no doubting the data read performance of the OCZ Vertex SSD in our sample system, its 30GB capacity is a real issue - By the time you've installed Windows Vista alongside a restore partition (unfortunately MESH have chosen this over giving you a copy of the original installation media) you're left with basically no space to work with.

Thankfully, the final Slayer Elemental systems on store shelves are shipping with a 64GB Samsung SSD as standard instead, largely negating these capacity issues (albeit at a slight performance impact I would wager) and thus offering a more balanced configuration in storage terms.

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Supplementing that SSD is a 750GB Samsung F1 hard drive - A great performer in its own right amongst standard hard disks, and giving you plenty of additional storage for data and applications.