All pictures can be clicked to enlarge

Ah, yes- there's nothing like the smell of packing peanuts and silicon. A smell most of us hardware junkies and PCAbusers know all to well! It's time to crack open the box and see what the this Skyhawk SFF PC is all about.

The computer came to us just as other SFF pcs we have seen, a relatively cubed box, with rigid but absorbing foam holding the pc in place. The extra packing peanuts all around it was a nice touch- ensuring the nice aluminum finish remains flawless.

Above is the contents of the box (Minus pc). Its a pretty complete package. We will go more into detail about each individual item later, but here is a list of the goodies.

• Pc/Case Manual
• Motherboard Manual
• Driver Disk
• Additional(optional) cooling fan for high performance situations
• Spire "Icey Mountain" copper heatpipe heatsink
• Retention clips
• Thermal Paste
• Rounded and sleeved ide and floppy cables
• Remote control for Multimedia functions
• Floppy faceplate
• sata cable
• PSU cable

Now that's a whole lot of goodies! But not surprising, this computer is pretty much designed to be a "Ready to Build" project. In fact since the motherboard, psu and all headers and jumpers all already pre wired, The Skyhawk is a breeze to build and should be a great experience for first time builders, and a nice break for us veterans. Total build time for me was about 1 hour, and that included installing the OS and loading the drivers!

The Exterior of the case is quite appealing. The 1mm high quality aluminum looks fantastic and feels sleek. The front face plate has a very nice layout. It slots a volume knob and well as a temperature readout which will display temps from 4 internal probes (CPU, Video card, Hard drive, and Ambient case). The display also can show fan rpm's. This is a feature that makes this little unit stand out. Each side has punched holes and when the optional fan is installed, this provides for a nice amount of air to flow inside the case from side to side. The quality of this SFF is as good if not better then others i have looked at.

Opening the small door on the front of the case reveals two usb 2.0 ports, A firewire ports, a microphone plug, and a headphone/speaker plug. These are nice when packing this thing to a lan, or when doing video editing it is nice to be able to just plug the video camera in the front firewire port.