jmke

I arrived at home like normal the other day. After a long day of doing more than humanly possible, I put my bags down, sat down in my (Now relatively flat-cushioned) mesh back computer chair, and turned on my computer. After going through my usual routine of replying to emails and other messages I have missed during my short 30-minutes-made-20 commute -- where time is inversely proportional to speed, let's just leave it at that -- I got out of my chair and began to change in my walk-in closet. I glanced at the nice little wire rack I leave my technology equipment on. You know, charging station for my laptop and cell phone, you get the idea. One of the shelves on the wire rack is probably a geek dream to many. Inside it is a box that contains the G.SKILL Ripjaws-X F3-17000CL9D-8GBXLD DDR3 RAM I have reviewed last week, as well as two unopened boxes containing one ASUS P8P67 Pro and one ASUS P8H67-I motherboard, respectively. Next to it is my Canon EOS 60D dSLR body with the usual expensive flash and lens attached. At that moment, I realized I haven't even touched any of this stuff for an entire week. If you are in the field of engineering, you will know what I am talking about. You have all the nice stuff, you know everything about it, but you just don't have the time to play with your toys. That said, it probably won't come as a surprise to you my home network is really like no other. In addition to running a QNAP TS-559 Pro+ network attached storage system with multiple hard drives running in RAID, I also have a custom built server on the side running Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard. Why? Well, just because I can, haha. Lately, I decided I could use a little more processing power. Conveniently, I got a lot of last generation Intel processors lying around. Scooping up all the components together, all I am missing is a nice chassis to put all the parts in. I wanted something big, roomy, high quality, has decent cooling capabilities, low maintenance with regards to dust, and good looking; despite the fact no one is going to be looking at it. Then I came across the Fractal Design Define XL. Pretty much the XL version -- pun intended -- of the company's renowned R3 chassis, how well does this Extended ATX case stack up in real life? Read on to find out!

http://aphnetworks.com/reviews/fractal_design_define_xl

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