Attention to detail
The Pandora S features a lot of nice touches. For instance, the LEDs are a nice blue color for both the power and HDD lights. Although it's difficult to tell from the picture, the two blue LEDs are slightly different in color. On the bottom, you'll notice the case has plastic rubber nubs that keep the system from touching the floor. It creates enough space for the holes on the bottom of the case to draw in fresh air into the system.

The internal exhaust fan of the case is Windy's own branded "quiet" 60mm fan. It truly is a quiet fan—much quieter than the one in the Shuttle SV24. The Soldam system doesn't not come with a special CPU heatsink or fan because it doesn't require one. In fact, the system can accommodate a decent sized heatsink and fan. I chose Thermaltake's Mini Copper Orb because it offers more than enough cooling performance for a PIII 1GHz+ chip. You'll probably also notice the black thing; it's Zalman's Fan Mate 1, which allows you to adjust the fan speed. I have it on the heatsink fan lowering the RPMs to the lowest possible speed. The fan is inaudible during normal use.

Because a CD-ROM drive is a tight fit, the case has some holes at the back to let the drive breathe and to help vent hot air. Although not pictured, the case's cover is secured by low-profile thumbscrews for easy access.

All of these little touches makes the case really stand out. I don't think I've ever dealt with a PC case that took so many details into account. The case has ample airflow, only creates a whisper of noise, and adds extra flexibility by allowing two 5.25" drives. Of course, you pay a pretty penny for such polished kit.

Maxing it out
Since most reviews dealing with the SV24 (with FV24 motherboard) focused on lower end systems, I decided to try to max out the Pandora system to see what one could expect performance wise. Although a majority of my time involves writing, coding, wokring with graphics and editing video, I like to play games when I get a chance. I wanted the system to have reasonably decent performance, so here's are the components I chose for my Pandora box.

• CPU: Pentium III 1Ghz (133MHz FSB) - Because this board doesn't currently support Tualatin chips, 1.13GHz is the best possible CPU you can get. I didn't get a 1.13GHz CPU because the small increase in CPU power didn't justify the price.

• Memory: 2 x OCZ 512MB PC150 SDRAM - 1GB memory baby...why not max it out? Why PC150? Well, the motherboard claims to support 150MHz FSB. We'll see about that...

• Video Card: Inno3D Tornado GeForce 2 MX400 32MB PCI with DVI - First of all, since we only have one PCI slot for expansion and we know that video performance is the "weakest link" in this system, we upgrade the video. There are slightly better GeForce2 MX400 PCI video cards (mainly because they have 64MB of memory), but I chose this particular (very hard to find) card because it's one of very very few PCI video cards that support DVI. I wanted DVI because I use a SGI 1600SW 17.4" 16:9 monitor on my desk. The monitor will accept both DVI and analog inputs, but I prefer DVI because it looks so much better.

• Hard Disk: Western Digital 60GB 7200RPM 600BB - Originally, I had a Seagate 80GB Barracuda ATA-IV in this system but it died within a week of testing, unfortunately taking away my test data with it. I wanted the Seagate because it has fluid bearings and is insanely quiet. This WD drive makes a decent replacement. It's nearly as quiet as the Seagate and offers the same level of performance.

• Optical Disk: Ricoh 9120A DVD/CDR/CDRW/CD 8x12x10x32x - I chose this combo drive because it offers everything I need and only takes up one bay. Also, it's very quiet compared to the faster burn-only drives I've used.

The manual for the FV24 states that it supports user selectable front-side bus (FSB) speeds. When I received my system, it was running the latest version of the BIOS (FV24STVA), which disabled the ability to change the FSB. I flashed the BIOS to the original version (FV24S015), which allows FSB selection. So, at 150MHz FSB, the Pentium III runs at 1.125Ghz and all my performance benchmarks reflect this. Subsequent versions of the BIOS are all missing the the front-side bus adjustment.