Smooth Creations LANShark Extreme Gaming Rig

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, February 19, 2009, 01:29 PM EDT

Since you are here, reading this and potentially some other articles and news about PC hardware, you've probably attended or at least heard of LAN parties. The main point of LAN parties is, of course, to play video games with your peers on networked PCs. Another fun aspect of LAN parties, especially big events like QuakeCon, is that you get to see all the cool, unique hardware that party goers bring. We're sure some people really get a kick out of showing up the competition with awesome mods and paint jobs.

Not everyone has the desire to mod or paint their own systems, though. That's where a company like Smooth Creations comes in to help you impress everyone who lays eyes upon your rig. Smooth Creations sells all types of custom PCs, including desktops and notebooks. As you may have gathered by now, we are going to focus on the company's LAN gaming system -- the LANShark.

Smooth Creations offers three different base configuration levels of the LANShark: Standard, Pro and Extreme. We received the LANShark Extreme for analysis in our labs. The "Extreme" configured LANShark is the most tricked out LANShark offered by Smooth Creations. It is without a doubt an extremely impressive looking system, complemented by equally impressive hardware components, including an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 processor, a Western Digital Velociraptor hard drive, a Diamond Radeon HD 4870 X2 video card, 8GB of Kingston HyperX memory, and a complete watercooling system.

Smooth Creations LANShark Extreme Gaming Rig

Tags: Gaming, system, LAN party

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com