GraVT Professional Photographer System Review

Internal Impressions

Opening up the GraVT Professional (GVT-PPS68X) side panel was easy thanks to the panel being held on by a pair of thumbscrews. With the door removed we are face-to-face with a very clean looking interior with fairly decent cable management. The LIAN LI PC-8FIR chassis that was used for this build isn’t the easiest of cases to properly route wires in as we have used this case ourselves in the past. It should be noted that GraVT usually offers the GraVT Professional in black, but since we will be giving this system away they wanted to spruce it up a bit and sent over the red model.

Removing the right side panel we found that the wiring was nicely routed and bundled together, despite having hardly any room behind the motherboard tray on the LIAN LI PC-8FIR. The LIAN LI PC-8FIR has a CPU cutout in the motherboard tray and while it is small it did happen to lineup with the Intel DZ68BC motherboard being used here. If you ever wanted to chance the CPU Cooler you can easily do so without removing the case. We noticed that not all of the SATA cables were the same colors, which might be to visually differentiate the SSD from the HDD’s.

GraVT went with the Intel DZ68BC motherboard for the GraVT Professional PC (GVT-PPS68X). The Intel Core i7-2600K processor is kept cool by the Antec Kuhler H20 620 water cooler (read our review), which is a nice solution. The video card is a ASUS branded NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 1280MB GDDR5 model. The exact part number is ENGTX570 DirectCU II and this card is a beast as we reviewed it earlier this month!

The GraVT Professional features 16GB (4 x 4GB) of Kingston ValueRam that is rated at PC-10600 or 1333MHz! The modules were found to be running 9-9-9-24 2T timings. The part number on the memory is KVR1333D3N9/4G and these are very low profile memory modules. The DIMM slot clips are slightly taller than the top of the PCB on these modules. This is great as the modules don’t block airflow as drastically as some of the taller modules that have heat spreaders on them.

The system is powered by a Cooler Master 1000 Watt Silent Pro power supply with model number RSA00-AMBAJ3-US. It has single +12V rail that is rated at 80 Amps and a +3.3V and +5V that are each rated at 30 Amps. With up to 80A on a single 12V rail, this power supply delivers where it counts and wont have any problems powering even the most demanding multi-graphics card solutions. This PSU features flat modular cables for improved airflow and cable management. We noticed that GraVT zip tied the the power supply cables to the hard drive cage, which was odd as you couldn’t easily remove the HDD cage.

Speaking of the hard drive cage, you’ll find it directly behind the two 120mm red LED fans on the front of the case, which is nice as it keeps air flowing around the drives. You want to keep your hard drive as cool as possible as heat is your enemy on critical components like your storage drive. The GraVT Professional (GVT-PPS68X) went with an Intel 311 ‘Larson Creek’ 20GB SSD for Intel SRT (read our review) and a pair of Western Digital Caviar Black (WD2002FAEX) 2TB 3.5-inch internal hard drives. These drives feature the latest SATA III 6Gbps interface with a 7200 RPM spindle speed and 64MB of cache. This drive offers rock-solid performance and is ideal for gaming, enthusiast and professional computing needs.