Inspired by all the fun I had working on the War Room page, I've gone back and dug up the old pictures I took during the assembly of The Beast, a.k.a. Celes. Actually I had planned on doing this page quite a long time ago, but a small character flaw commonly termed "laziness" got in the way of my grand design. Anyways, I've conquered my sloth (or at least beaten it over the head with a brick a few times) and now you can marvel at the glories of my rig. Or you might prefer to just leave me to my insane ramblings and spare yourself five minutes of looking at blurry photos.

Here you can see the XBlade case that I chose to house the rig. Not a whole lot to say here, except that it looks a lot better when it's powered up.

I ran across the CoolerMaster Aerogate II while shopping for components. Besides the obvious necessity of a fancy temperature control unit for a new gaming system, I just couldn't pass up the perfect match with the XBlade case.

The AeroGate has been lazily slapped onto the front of the XBlade. Huzzah.

Here we have the Asus A8V-E Deluxe motherboard, marinated in our special sauce and slow-roasted for extra awesome.

This is the nice, juicy AMD Athlon64 3200+ that makes it all tick. Or buzz. Or whatever it is that it does. At least, I think it does something.

This is my precious, a Sapphire Radeon X800 XL. Sadly, I got this card about two weeks before the 512MB edition came out, so it's "only" the 256MB version. However, it still kicks a metric boatload of ass. This card was one of the big players in the War Room episode.

The XBlade features a screwless drive mounting system. You just snap these little friction-fit rails onto the side of the drive, and slide it into the bay. I think that's a pretty nifty innovation. It sure beats getting cuts all over the backs of your hands trying to slide drives in and out of more common-style bays. I remember cutting up my hands at least once on every computer I've owned since my first 386, and I was very glad to finally build a system without shedding blood (of my own).

Here's all the important bits mounted in the case and ready to go. Cabling is still missing, obviously. You can see a slightly better perspective on the hard drive bays. Clearly, this is a vastly superior way to put hard drives into a metal box. I'm a little bit surprised that nobody invented it sooner. Either that, or they did invent it sooner, and I'm just too stupid to have found one until now.

Power supply cable, meet motherboard. Motherboard, meet power supply cable. Apoch, feel like a total moron for not checking the specs when you bought the parts.

Five bucks and a couple of agonizing days later (stupid parcel delivery services), problem solved.

At the point in time when I took this picture, that was the messiest my flat's floor had ever been. Now, I have to look at this picture to remind myself what a floor is.

Celes takes her first steps down the Dark Path. Which is illuminated with blue LEDs. But it's still dark. Blue.

Aww, she's so cute when she's sleeping...