Holly KA32W

It looks like a standard gaming PC, but Holly's latest system is much more than that. The KA32W stands out from the crowd by dint of the major components - processor, north bridge and graphics card - all being water-cooled courtesy of a Gainward CoolFX system. When we originally reviewed the CoolFX, we were less than ecstatic, since it was an awful lot of faff just to cool the graphics card, but extending the system to other internal components makes it far more worthwhile.

The machine is housed in an Antec Sonata case, with an extremely high-quality gloss black finish. Holly has managed to avoid the fundamental faux pas of decent-looking system design: open the front panel door and you're greeted by an NEC ND-2500A DVD writer and a Mitsumi CR-487 CD-RW drive, both clad with black, not beige, fasciae.

Inside, the tightly packed machine is based around a DFI LAN Party PRO875 motherboard, sporting Intel's 875 Canterwood chipset, fitted with a 3.2GHz Northwood Pentium 4. You also get 1GB of Corsair TwinX memory rated to PC4000 for operation up to 500MHz. This is 100MHz over the speed required for the standard DDR400 memory bus, which should give plenty of headroom when it comes to testing the mettle of the cooling system for overclocking.

Nestling at the front are two Western Digital Caviar SE 120GB Serial ATA hard disks, configured in a RAID-0 striped array, giving you 240GB of fast storage space. On the ancillary front, there's a Gainward 7.1 PCI sound card, and Holly has even popped a PCI modem in there too. This leaves three PCI slots free, although the graphics card's heatsink impinges on one of those and more or less precludes its use.

With the radiator, pump and pipework of the water-cooling system, plus two PCI cards, optical drives and twin hard disks, there isn't much room for manoeuvre internally (see right), but the pipework is neatly routed and cut correctly to length, with both radiator and water pump securely bolted to the case. And there's still room for two more hard disks, with one 3.5in and one 5.25in front panel bay spare too.

The CoolFX graphics card's cooling arrangement is identical to the one we looked at previously, but beneath the massive block of aluminium there lies an nVidia GeForce 5950 Ultra chip, nVidia's current fastest model. But you should bear in mind the KA32W's potentially limited upgradability. Subject to future motherboard form factor changes, upgrading the processor and motherboard shouldn't present a problem, but while the CoolFX may fit upcoming nVidia cards, your chances with anything from ATi are essentially zero. That said, Holly may be able to supply different heatsinks in the future.

The water-cooling system uses an Eheim pump with twin 120mm AcoustiFans to draw cooling air over the radiator. AcoustiFans are among the quietest around (see issue 112, p298) and they're allied to two Zalman FanMate speed controllers to cut noise even further. And this is certainly a quiet system: with no north bridge or CPU fans, the only noise comes from the radiator coolers, power supply fan and hard disks.

The monitor is Iiyama's new 431S-B 17in TFT; anyone less than 10-hour-a-day hard-core Unreal Tournament nuts will be happy with its 16ms response time for gaming. Audio is handled by a set of Creative Inspire T7700 7.1 surround-sound speakers, which you could call overkill, but they do make a big impact if you have the space to set up all eight drivers. And as well as the Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse combo, you get TerraTec's Razer Boomslang mouse (see issue 108, p300) and Claw controller, plus a Mystify Speedpad.