Freshly Unpacked Eagle Arion 2.1

The Eagle Arion 2.1 is a budget speaker system consisting of 2 front speakers and a subwoofer with a built in digital EQ & crossover.  We picked up the speakers from Newegg for $59.00.
Here are the specs directly from the Eagletech website:

-Total RMS Power: 35 Watts
–Satellites: 10 Watts RMS x 2 (into 4 ohms, @<=1% THD)
–Subwoofer: 15 Watts RMS x 2 (into 4 ohms, @<=1% THD)
-Total Peak Power: 70 Watts
-Frequency Response: 20Hz to 20kHz
Drivers:
-Satellites: Dual 3-inch midrange and 1-inch tweeter with solid wood enclosure
-Subwoofer: 5.25”-inch driver with solid wood enclosure

Speaker Dimension:
-Satellites: 4.33” x 9.65” x 4.77”
-Subwoofer: 6.7” x 11.03” x 10.25”

PACKAGE CONTENT
-ET-AR504LR-BK speaker system
-Remote control with battery
-User manual
-3.5mm to RCA audio cable

The Arions came with everything listed above, and was packed in eco-friendly recycled cardboard formed inserts.  Its nice to see eco-friendly materials being used.  We’re pointing this out because you might be able to see in our photo’s that there was a fair amount of dust on the speakers right out of the box from the recycled material.  Wipes off easily.

Satellite rear view

The Arions are an attractive looking set of desktop speakers albeit a little on the large size at nearly 10inches in height.  Despite the physical dimensions the speakers and sub were not heavy in the slightest.   The weight actually tipped us off as to the quality of the drivers used in the speakers.   A larger and therefore heavier magnet will typically produce better sound.   More on sound quality later.  Each speaker has a color coded RCA connection wired directly to the speaker.  The length of the speaker cable we found to be  short at a meager 3 feet.   With only 3 foot speaker cables its obvious that the sub is designed to be placed on the desk.   Due to the speaker cable length, if you want to place the sub under your desk, its going to be right at your feet.  An extra couple of feet of cable would have made placing the sub in other locations under a desk possible.

The sub from behind

Lets talk about the sub/amp/crossover.  Looking at the back of the sub there are 2 inputs, 1 output, and a power switch.  Something to note is using the “CD” or line input will disable the RCA’s.

In's and Out's

We like the fact Eagle included both an 3.5mm (headphone) & RCA input.  Shown here is the 3.5mm speaker out to RCA cable that came with the Arion’s.  It is 3 feet in length, further limiting the sub placement issues.

The only power switch is a toggle on the back of the sub.  This is a negative as that you cannot turn the speakers off any other way.   Unless you want to leave these speakers on all the time, you absolutely must reach around to the back of the sub to turn them off.   Also take note that the front of the sub has a illuminated display that does not turns off unless you switch off the power.  This seems oddly short sighted considering that they made the effort to use eco-friendly packing materials but have no convenient way to power down the speakers when not in use.

Sub display

Above is an image of the front of the sub while turned off.   When its on, the whole display is illuminated in typical LED blue.  Running vertically from the base to the top of the display is a LEFT & RIGHT level meter.  Adjusting the balance (only available through the OS) we see the meter still reads the same.  Basically, its a Mono level meter that appears as though it is in stereo.  The display dims with each bass hit illustrating that this system could either benefit from a little more power, or some dedicated power to the display.

Near the bottom of the sub is a 5 button digital level adjustment for the whole system.  It’s difficult to see in our photo but the Arions adjustment buttons consists of MENU, UP, DOWN, MUTE, RESET.   Pressing MENU provides 3 choices treble, bass or volume.   What would have been nice is a simple volume control and a power switch on one of the speakers.

Arion Remote Control

Now lets look at the remote.  Seems like another good location for a power button, but it has none.   Its a simple IR (infrared) remote with controls for Volume + / -, Treble + / -, Bass + / -, Mute, and Reset.

Finally lets talk about what is really important:  sound quality.
Simply put: its mediocre.  Not bad, but rather disappointing.  For nearly sixty dollars we would expect more.  In fact we have seen better sound from some $30 systems.

Sound is a subjective thing so we can only give you our honest impressions.  We used multiple sources to test the sound of the Arions.  With the Computer we played CD’s ranging from Techno to Rock, Hip-hop to world music.  We also tested various movies, MP3’s and games.  We then ran a full range frequency response test using an oscilloscope.

Right out of the box the system is missing certain key frequencies both audibly and with the O-scope.   Best described the sound was muddy with piercing highs.  Adjusting the treble and bass on the sub we were able to somewhat balance the sound.  By somewhat we mean bass was muddy, highs were piercing, however it wasn’t just sound in a tin can with rumble.   We hit the reset on the remote and went into the OS controls where we were able to balance things much better, but the mid-low end of the system was definitely hollow something we could not correct with the EQ and bass was lacking the “deep bass” tones of the sub 40hz range.

Again, by its inferred design the sub is meant to be located on the desk.  So, we began to change the position of the sub itself.   Even with the sub in a “sweet spot” we found the sound was unbalanced between different sources.  When games sounded good, movies sounded strange, when movies sounded good, music was flat, etc.   We eventually found that placing the sub on desk will make this sub directional.  Meaning, the bass always hits from the left or right depending on placement.   If we put the sub next to the monitor on the right, low end bass sounds of the explosions came from the right and vice versa with the left.   Eventually we found we ended up with the best sound if the Sub was sideways, port facing us, and placed directly behind the monitor.   Having the sub in this position really defeats the purpose of all the display lights of the front of the sub because in this location they cannot be seen.   On a positive note having the sub behind the monitor did improve the effort involved with shutting off the power, but rendered the remote difficult to use as its IR and must be pointed directly at the front of the sub to work.  It was all a lot of reaching around the monitor that wouldn’t be necessary if there were volume and power controls on one of the speakers.

Eagle states on its site the frequency response of the Arion’s is 20hz-20khz.   Initially we found the range to be 50-12khz, although generally speakers need a significant “burn in” before they reach their full potential.   So with the permission of our client we were able to run a burn in of about 30hours and it did help the sound out.   After testing & burn-in we found the range to be closer 40hz – 12khz per the O-scope.   The sound quality did improve after burn in but never sounded truly great.

Our final verdict is: The Eagle Arion 2.1 speakers are just OK.   They are a large but physically attractive set of speakers with some definite design flaws.  We could have recommended the Arions if there was simple a volume control & power switch located on one of the speakers.  Ultimately they are better than a 2.0 solution, but for the money you can have better sound & convenience for less money.

Vortex 3620 exterior

In a nutshell, the Vortex 3620 is a Screwless budget case with a number of high end features. Lets just start by saying at the date of this review, this case has more in common with cases nearer to the $60 mark. We found the 3620 for $35 +shipping from newegg.com.

Features included in this case are: Rolled steel edges, Painted interior, Mesh front with filters, 2 120mm quiet case fans, Screwless entry & drive system, cable management, and a top mounted front panel including 4usb, audio out, mic in, and ESATA.

3620 From Behind

Our case was listed/sold as an APEX case, however the case was packed in a Maxcube box.  After a little research we discovered that the apex variants are silver & black, while the Maxcube is all black.  Our case was all black, therefore a Maxcube.   Both case variants are identical aside from the paint scheme.

Packaging was the standard fare, front panel coated in a peel off plastic, then covered in a plastic bag and fitted into Styrofoam cutouts.   Interestingly the box says the case has 5 fans, although it contained only 2 and had mounts for 4.   The 2 fans included are both  of the 120mm variety and both are pre-installed.  The non illuminated is under the power supply mount, the other is a blue LED fan mounted behind the hard drive cage.  The remaining 2 fan mounts are both for 120 mm fans located on the door.

Lets get to the specifics.

Case front

The front of the case is made of  black gloss plastic & black metal mesh. The mesh is backed by black filter material to help keep things dust free inside.   Maxcube did a very nice job with the implementation of the mesh front of this case with every slot having its own filter that is easily removable for cleaning.   The edges of the front panel are a black gloss plastic with the edging being a flat black.  The gloss black does a great job of showing finger prints, but are easily wiped away with dry cloth.  The power button and reset switches are mounted to the left and right of the I/O panel at the top of the case and are implemented well, feeling sturdy while being easy to press.

The only thing we found somewhat annoying with the front of the case was the Power (blue) and HDD (red) LED’s which we feel were a little too bright, but really thats just a matter of taste.  The I/O at the top of the case features 4 usb ports, 1 mic in, 1 line out and 1 ESATA port.  The ESATA port was a nice touch and a much welcome addtion to the case instead of the typical firewire port found on most budget cases.

Front panel Removed

In the picture here (taken after we installed the drive) you can see behind the front panel.  Lets start by saying the front panel removal was probably the easiest we’ve ever used.  A lot of cases feel as though they are going to break (and sometimes do) when removing the front panel to access the drive bays, fans, etc.   The front of the 3620 literally just popped off with ease.  While that can raise red flags such as eventual rattle, we saw no cause for alarm as the mounts have a design that will keep the front snug against the case.  With the panel removed you can see how accessible the drive bays and front fan are.  Interestingly the I/O panel is removable, and has a 5.25 mount that you can separate from the port housing.  So the I/O is designed to fit in either the 5.25 or 3.5 bays.  So if you don’t like the panel up top you can mount it mid case in either of the 3.5 bays that have external access.  Nice touch.  Keep in mind doing so means moving one of the 3.5 bay covers to the top because the slot is 5.25, but the case’s front panel design is 3.5 between the power and reset switches .

Now lets look inside the case.

inside the case

The sheet metal inside of this case is both rolled (no sharp edges), and painted black.  All of the drive bays have a screwless design that are effective and easy to use.   The pci system is a screwless design, and was the low point of the 3620. We’ll discuss the pci design a little later. Inside the case was a bag containing motherboard screws, drive screws, additional screwless drive mechanisms, peel & stick cable routing mounts, as well as 3 to 4 pin & molex adapters for the case fans.   Another perk is the case screws & motherboard mounts are black, matching the case. Coming down from the top are the I/O to mainboard cables and all are appropriately labeled for easy connection & long enough to easily route behind the mainboard tray to keep things tidy.  One last thing to note here is this case will accommodate even the longest video cards such as a Nvidia GTX295 or the ATI 5970.

backside of the motherboard tray

Pictured above we can see the bottom of the motherboard tray showing the various holes & cable routing clips.  There is a generously sized hole below the CPU. While theres no way to install a fan in this area, it does make a modern 3rd party heat sink/cooler a snap to install.

The cable routing in this case was well thought out and one of the high points in the Vortex.  Near the top of the case there is a very convenient hole to route power cabling through.  The hole was a tad on the small side but with some mild manipulation we were able to get the majority of the power cables routed through with the exception of the 20+4 main connector.  Again, routing the main power connector wouldn’t be at all possible.

We found that routing our power & SATA cables using only the 2 clips built into the underside of the mainboard tray was adequate to keep things nice a clean topside.  More than 3 additional device cables would require the included peel & stick on cable routing clips.

HDD fan interior

Mounted in front of the removable HDD cage is an illuminated 120mm intake fan shown here.  The fan LED is blue.  Looking at the design of the drive cage, its clear that airflow past the HDD cage is not going to be a problem.   One thing to note with the drive mounting for both 5.25 & 3.5 devices:  There are  only 1 of each screwless mechanism included as extras.   This would be an inconvenience if you were to  fill  all your drive bays, and wanted to do so without using screws.  There are only enough screwless mounts for three 5.25 devices and two 3.5 devices.   Its simple enough to take the  unused extra mount off one side and put it on the opposite side.

And now the negative:

Screwless pci - unscrew and throw out

Thus far our review has been rather positive, but there are some problem spots with this case and they all surround the PCI area.  Lets start at the screwless pci system, basically its garbage.  Its a simple system that moves vertically.  Lift the slider up, insert your card, push it down and it locks into place.  Except it doesn’t keep the card firmly in place.  After we put in our graphics card, it wobbled around so much it was virtually indistinguishable from the card installed without the retention mechanism pushed down.   The flaw here is the mechanism in the down position doesn’t really lock the card in place.  Removing 3 screws you can toss it out and just use screws, which is what we recommend doing.

The second problem is the PCI slot covers.  They were honestly one of the most difficult to remove we’ve ever encountered.  We couldn’t figure out why they were designed the way they were.  The usual “wiggle them back and forth till they break off” doesn’t work here.  It ended up being a “remove the mainboard and chisel them out with a screwdriver and hammer” kind of method.   So our greatest bit of wisdom we can give you is this: REMOVE ALL THE PCI COVERS BEFORE YOU BEGIN YOUR BUILD WITH THE VORTEX 3620! We cannot stress this enough. Failure to do so will equal much work later.  Seriously, save yourself the headache.  Included in the bag of goodies with this case are black painted PCI covers that screw in tightly.

Finished Look

The install on the Maxcube 3620 was a real pleasure considering its budget price of $35.  Building with cases in this price bracket there are some common experiences such as a minor cuts from sharp sheet metal, headaches associated with poor design, and other hassles of a cheap case.  The 3620 was none of those things. It was like working on a significantly more expensive case.  Painted interior, rounded corners, cables routing, good airflow & screwless design was a win.  The only drawbacks to the case were around the pci area which are easy to overlook as long as you take our warning above.
Pros:
+Painted interior
+Screwless Design
+Cable Management
+Good Airflow

Cons:

-PCI retention system
-PCI Slot covers

If you’re on a budget, we highly recommend this case.

Vortex 3620 in the dark

Our camera sux

Today we review the Winsis Wb-27.

First and foremost the Wb-27 is a budget oriented mid-tower case with a minimal exterior.   We got the case from Newegg.com for $45 +shipping.  The major selling point for this case to our client was: She wanted something very minimal looking with USB and audio ports on the top.  After looking through about 20 case styles this is the only case she was even remotely interested in.  She also requested a computer that was very quiet, but we’ll get into that late in the review.  So, we ordered it up and heres our thoughts on what we observed.

Lets start with packaging. This case came wrapped in a big plastic bag,  packed in the standard box full of Styrofoam cutouts keeping it firmly in place… to firmly?  I don’t want to get silly on this but the standard “exacto the top open, turn it upside down and let the case slide out”, didn’t here.  Looked like a glue accident, adhering the Styrofoam to the box.  Funny.

Above is our first image of the case freshly unpacked.   And we know you’re thinking it… yes we need a better camera.   We’ll be getting one and posting a review of it in the coming weeks.

Being that our camera has some obvious deficiencies it’s impossible to tell from this photo that the front panel is indeed plastic painted to look like brushed aluminum.  It would have been great if the door was a brushed aluminum or steel, but that would have added a few dollars to the price tag of the case.  I feel it would have been worth a few extra dollars as the paint used, while doing an excellent job of looking like metal, shows fingerprints that ended up being difficult to remove.   Furthermore the paint was a bit uneven looking less like metal near the top, almost as if the styrofoam & plastic bag had perhaps rubbed off a little of the paint.  Honestly, we needed to be pretty close to the case to tell, from a distance it looked like the paint was uniform.

From the rear

The Winsis Wb-27 is a “screwless case”, in that the door has 2 screwless thumb screws and the drive bays have a screwless design of which we thought was a good design.  Later in the review ill talk about the screwless drive mounts.

The case has flimsy door has a latch that does little to ease the side removal.  In fact it makes the door removal more complicated than it should be.

For years I’ve seen a vast number of designs for the “easy” removal of a door.   Sadly, many are horrible.  This case took an new approach and they missed the mark by a long shot.  Getting this door on was not easy.   Every time we had them all hooked (its a hook system), one would pull up somewhere else as we pushed it closed.   The plastic latch on the door would then lock when one was not in place, forcing us to start over.

It was kind of a gag for us.  “hey do me a favor and put the cover on that”… hilarity ensues.

The open case and door

Opening the case up we can see that its a standard steel interior and comes with 1 120mm fan pre mounted below the power supply (not included).  The fan has dual connectors for both power supply or mainboard.  Also included is an utterly unusable screwless PCI slot system in this case.   The group of cables coming down from the top of the case are the USB, audio, and power connectors on the top of the case.  More about all of those later.   On the door there is a non adjustable exhaust port and a series of holes drilled like a grate for what appears to be additional ventilation.

First lets talk about the drilled grating.  We can not figure out how this is supposed to work.  From our initial observations we thought we could mount dual 80mm fans directly to the door.  However the hole pattern drilled is not compatible with any fans. Maybe if you had an 81.5mm fan you could use it.  We dont know of any such fans that exist in the wild.  So, we guess, it is merely a vent.  Our question is for what?  Any hot air that low in the case would rise.  Seems to us its more of a dust intake (not good).   We ended up gluing in a piece of mesh filter over the inside to cut down on any dust entering the case through these holes.

Secondly the Air duct:  It was not adjustable despite its appearance, and comes with a very fine mesh filter glued over the exhaust end.  The mesh and design of the vent hindered airflow.  Also a little perplexing is that a mesh this fine would do nothing more than trap dust inside and easily clog.  Once blocked it wouldn’t do anything other than keep hot air over the CPU.  Bad.   In a typical system, we could see this leading to thermal problems.  We ended up unscrewing it and throwing it away, then installing an 80mm exhaust fan.   A final thing perplexing about the exhaust fan mount is it only has 2 screw mounts pre-drilled.  The metal was stamped creating 4  raised mounts.  However, only 2 screw holes were pre-drilled.  Attempting to use just 2 screws to mount the 80mm fan created an irritating rattle as the fan wobbled against the cases sheet metal.  Luckily we had a drill bit that that made short work of the  sheet metal, and we drilled the 2 additional holes needed to silence the rattle.   Our opinion; you shouldn’t need a power drill to install a system fan.

Third, lets discuss the PCI screwless system.  In a nutshell, its a piece of plastic garbage we had remove and throw away.  The design of the screwless pci retention system cannot accommodate any kind of double slot card, which is moot due to the fact that you cannot install a pci card of single slot design when the motherboard is installed.   The design of the retention system has a tab used to lock cards into place. The tab is so tall that it wont move to the full open position as it hits the back side of the case.  This requires an angle to install any card, and the angle is so great you cant get a card of any moderate length in.   Luckily the 4 screws we had to remove to get it out of the case worked quite nicely in securing our cards to the chassis.

Exterior I/O & Powerswitch

Now lets talk about the exterior usb / audio / firewire connectors and their interior cabling.  The top connectors & style is why our client chose this case.  We have to admit it is a physically attractive case and as you can see from the photo the case has 2 top mounted audio jacks: 1 stereo out and 1 microphone in.  Also located here is the power switch, 2 usb ports, and a firewire connection.

The Internal cabling was adequate and labeled with the appropriate + / -   to aid in connection to the power LED and switch.  The USB and audio were standard connectors and just barely long enough to reach the bottom of a full ATX board with video card installed.   By “just” we mean it was tight getting the audio cable over our video card to the audio connection on the mainboard. Snug, but in the end connected it was.  Later in the review you can see a picture of the  cables connected to our mainboard for a better illustration.

Open Door

The door uses a magnetic latch to stay closed. The thought of random unshielded magnets on a case (or anywhere near a computer) makes me personally shudder, however our testing indicated no ill side effects.  Curiously, it did give the door a nice feel when opening and closing.   Be careful to not just swing the door closed as the magnet has some strength to it leading to a pretty good “slam” when its not intentional.   Really only a minor note, the door didn’t quite line up flush on our case but wasn’t really noticeable until the power was turned on.  Once the power was turned on you could see the door wasn’t quite in line with the cutout.

.

Screwless drive retention

Lets move on to the inside of the case now.  The Wb-27 has a standard layout with the power supply up top, mainboard below.   There is ZERO cable routing options in this case.  We were hoping we could route cables behind the drive cages, but alas they are solid and mounted flush to the back side of the case meaning you cannot remove the back door and route them behind the HDD cage.  Furthermore the cages have no holes big enough to route power or SATA cables through.   Exacerbating the situation is the cages are all riveted in.  Seems like a slight re-cut on the drive cages would remedy the problem as well as the very limited airflow problem this creates.  More on that in a minute.

The drive bays have a screwless system, and this is what we found to be the best part of this case.  Its actually one of the best systems we have seen for screwless mounting.  The mechanism consists of 2 thread less screws held by a spring, manipulated by a simple lever.  When installing a drive you simply slide it into place, it will loosely catch, flip the lever and the case locks tightly into place.  We want to point out that the upper bays have 4 screwless mounts.  But this case only has 3 upper bays.  The top bay is completely used by the top panel I/O that doesn’t use the mount.  We wonder why they bothered to put the mount there.  It cant be used on anything but the upper mounts, so why is it there?  Who knows.  One more odd note about this case.  The floppy drive bays (honestly, who still needs these bays?), have retention only for floppy drives.  This means if you want to mount your HDD in the floppy space… you cant.  Period.  Looking at the photo you can see clearly theres only holes drilled for floppies.  Weird.

*whew* close call

Another oddity on this case is the number of Hard drives that can be installed screwlessly.  That number is 2.  It may not be a big deal for most, but we found it a bit strange to have  slots  for 5 drives, space for 3, and mounting for 2.  I’ll clear that up a little bit… There are screw holes drilled for 5 devices.  But the the top rivets protrude from the cage making it impossible to instal a standard HDD drive in that slot.  The lowest drive slot, has a similar problem.  It is impossible to get  a drive into the bottom slot due to the lip of the case.   That leaves 3 remaining slots, 2 of which have the screwless mechanism.    One thing to note: It is impossible to move or remove the screwless mechanism without breaking it.   Again, the HDD drive cage is riveted in.   This presents a problem with longer video cards in that the screwless mechanism protrudes a bit.  In our build, it was about 2mm from the edge of GTX260 we installed (see pic).   This means that newer cards, like the ATI 5800 series, will simply not fit inside this case.

Cooling:
The WB-27 has some additional issues here.  Above we talked about the air vent, and how we had to remove it, drill 2 holes so we could mount an exhaust fan over the CPU.  Without drilling additional holes through the sheet metal door, you can install a fan, but as described before it is going to rattle.  So for most, the choice you have is to A) use a poorly designed exhaust vent B) use no exhaust vent C) install a fan that rattles or D) drill.

The case came with a 120mm exhaust fan under the power supply.  The fan was not quiet, one our parameters was this box had to be quiet.  It required replacement and replace it we did.   Between the front of the case and the HDD cage there is a 120 / 90mm fan mount.  The issues here were 2 fold.  1st: Installing the fan was a pain.  We put in a 120mm silent fan as an intake.  Screwing the fan in required holding the fan in place while we screwed the closest screws to the door in.  That wasn’t difficult.  What was? The 2 screws near the other side.  There is no way to directly access the other side of the fan.  We discovered this when removing the other side of the case and finding a inconvenient piece of steel blocking any access to it.  So we got a stick and wedged it against the fan & case (as best we could) to hold the fan in place so we could thread the screws.   The 2nd issue is airflow.  There are adequate intake holes for air, although it could have been greatly improved by allowing the air to enter directly through the front of the case. Instead, air enters at the bottom under the front panel.   A side note: there is a slotted bit on the front of the case presumably to allow air intake, but its completely obscured by the door when the door is closed.  Additional testing indicated even with the door open, the air entered from the bottom of the case.  Finally the front fan blows onto the drive cage that has only mounting slots and screw holes to allow airflow.  Not the best by any measure.

System before fan replacement

Conclusion:
The Winsis Wb-27, despite how this review may appear, isn’t a terrible case.   It is an inexpensive and good looking case, but with some weird design flaws.  For around $50 it just doesn’t hold up to some of the competition, but it is unique in its minimal appearance.  Its flaws could easily have been caught & fixed prior to its release with some testing.  In our opinion, the bulk of the flaws in could be fixed for with little or no impact on the manufacturing price tag.  Problems such as the screwless pci mechanism, the door design, and exhaust vent are more than just an oversight, its a pure lack of testing.  The exhaust vent has a mesh that not only hinders airflow, but would easily clog. Furthermore only having 2 holes drilled despite having 4 mounts was just absurd.

Good:
+Minimal design
+Screwless drive mount design
+Cheap-ish

Bad:
-Airflow / Cooling
-Riveted drive cages & limited mounting options
-Screwless PCI design
-Zero cable management

Ultimately airflow, and specifically the exhaust vent, being detrimental to overall health of a computer system is why we are giving this case a: Not recommended.

111desingn was founded in 2001 as means to an end.  Sometime in the late 80’s I began to DJ and like all dj’s i had to have flyers.  So, i began a sub career in Graphic Design (flyers, posters, handbills, stickers, buttons, etc..).  People, bands, clubs, etc… seemed to enjoy my style of artwork /design aesthetic and began to contract me to do work for them.  At some point i grew weary of being on the road 24/7 and started investing more time in Graphic Design.  I began taking on larger projects like corporate identities, logos, package design, book design, tattoos, and websites.   Web design began way back in the early HTML days.  Eventually the majority of the web work i was doing was advanced Flash & CSS.

My clients included everything from non-profits to small business to large corporate & public entities.  Those clients eventually lead me full circle… back to custom computer builds, servers, networks and the like.

One day I realized I enjoy building custom PC’s more than anything else I’d been doing in many years. I wanted to provide a service differently than other system builders.  After some time i came up with a winning solution  and 111Tech custom systems was born.

At 111tech our philosophy is simple:  Build the best computer our clients can afford.

Our clients tell us how much they can afford to spend, and we build the best machine for their needs with that budget. We keep up to date with current and future technologies.  We do the research so our clients don’t have to.
On a side note, we do not keep a parts inventory.  We order the parts when our clients are ready to purchase. What this means is: our customers pay the latest (aka the lowest) prices for their parts. This bit of information is extremely important, because computer parts and their respective prices generally decrease over time.  No parts inventory means our clients are not locked to a price that we paid (and therefore must charge). They always get the latest pricing on name brand parts.

With every build, we recommend parts to our customers based on our research & experience.  However, frequently our customers desire a part that has little verifiable information or reviews on the web.   We see this as an opportunity to investigate and provide that information here.

Its 2010 and for us it is time to begin offering some honest unbiased information, how to’s, reviews, and opinions.

Whats honest unbiased mean?  It means real hands on experience and our uninfluenced impressions & experiences.

We don’t get anything from the manufacturers for review.  We get our parts from the same publicly commercial sources that anyone can purchase from.   Nearly everything we receive is via a client order and our reviews reflect our impressions based on what we see when we use it for their build.   We are not going to be posting new reviews or information that is already available through a number of other tech sites, unless our experience differs from what they are reporting.

Lets be honest, some tech reviews will have a positive or negative slant because the reviewer would like to keep receiving free merchandise from the manufacturer for review.  We all like free stuff.  It goes without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway, a manufacturer is less likely to send a product out for review if the reviewer has bashed other products.  We don’t have any of those temptations as our customers are the ones purchasing the product for themselves.  At 111design we base our reviews on what we observe while it was passing through our workbenches while keeping the clients identity private.

We’ll be posting soon and often to share our thoughts to help people make better educated decisions.