X-Bomber | Legion of Honour

Crystal, which is our desktop that we use for films and TV, has undergone so many upgrades in its long life, that the only original part of the machine is the OCZ ZT 650W PSU.

Phase 1 (2012 - 2018)
I built the machine in April 2012 in a Sharkoon T9 chassis with blue illumination and interior.

Crystal originally had a Phenom II X6 1045T, running on an Crosshair V Formula mainboard, with 4 x 4 GBs of Vengeance Blue and an XFX Radeon HD 7870 DD Black.

At that time, the machine had a 2TB Samsung F4, a 2TB WD20EARX, a 4TB Deskstar and a 6TB WD60EZRX for storage.

It inherited Akina's Antec Veris front panel, but with the DS200 (see below) having only two front bays, it now has a Rii i25 air mouse/keyboard/remote, which works well because you can also operate the TV from the same remote.

Phase 2 (2018 - 2025)
The Sharkoon T9 was a nice-looking case but I replaced it in 2018 with a Aerocool DS200 Black Window Edition chassis, which had better noise reduction, cable management and interchangeable hard drive trays.

Not very long after that, the Crosshair mainboard began to overheat; the mainboard, CPU and RAM were replaced with an ASUS PRIME X370-Pro, a Ryzen 7 1700 and 2 x 8GB Vengeance DIMMs.

Originally, the machine had liquid CPU coolers: an Antec Kuhler 620, and then a Corsair H80i V2, but the Ryzen 1700 runs quietly on its stock fan and heatsink.

In 2020, it had an WD M2 drive added for the OS, replacing its 2.5" SSD to help reduce the number of cables in the chassis.
At the same time, it was given a Pioneer Blu-ray drive. Before that, it went through a surprising number of Asus and Sony optical drives.
By this point, the hard disks had been reduced to a smaller number of larger drives: 2 x 6TB and 1 x 8TB WD Blues.

Phase 3 (2025 - )
In 2025, the Radeon 7870 started really heating up. The heatsink was separated from the chip as the thermal paste had dried out.
It should've been possible to fix, but I replaced it with a Sapphire Radeon 6500 XT which is a tiny ITX card that's very efficient and still has about twice the performance of the old 7870.

In 2026, I re-housed the machine in a new case.
The DS200 had a soft-touch rubberised coating that deteriorated.
The machine was moved into a white Fractal Pop XL, which has hidden front bay for an optical drives, plus a few mount points for 3.5" hard disks.
It makes the machine a nice focal point.

Rain

This was a great laptop with an i7 3630QM, 2 x 8GB DIMMs, and a Radeon HD 7970M, that lasted really well: longer that I would have expected from a gaming laptop.
It had a good illuminated keyboard, a really nice matte 1080p 95% sRGB display, and its design was quiet and understated.

There was a second 2.5" hard disk in the bay for the optical drive, which gave it some internal storage redundancy.

In 2020, I changed the 1TB Momentus XT and 1TB Scorpio Blue disks to a WD 1TB Blue SSD and a 2TB spindle, which gave it enough storage to last it the rest of its life.

In its last year of operation, its GPU started having problems. It held out just long enough for its replacement to arrive before it died completely.

Klan

This was an amazing machine that I picked up for very little through the Dell reseller: MCS.
It was a great gaming laptop for its time. It was absolutely gigantic. Everything on it lit up like the Coca-Cola Christmas truck and it had a glossy, marble-like finish on its casing, which looked fantastic.

It had the then-top-of-the-line Core2Extreme X9000 CPU, which the mainboard even allowed you to overclock.
The machine had 2 x 4GB of RAM and the fastest GPU that was available in the earlier models.
The card had 2 x 8800M GTX chips that could be run in SLI.

On the storage layer, it had 2 x Western Digital 250GB 7200rpm drives that ran in RAID 0, which made it very snappy.

It had a lovely 17" 1200p glossy 'Truelife' display, an illuminated silver keyboard and a neat little LCD display on the right side of the keyboard that displayed information from certain games such as inventory, as well as CPU and memory utilisation etc., which was very handy for code optimisation and debugging.

MCS threw in a pre-installed and activated copy of Windows 7 x64 Ultimate Edition, which was a beautiful OS.

Sadly, the machine wasn't long-lived. It developed a problem with its graphics adapter and could no longer be reflowed.
Replacing the GPU in this laptop means removing everything from the chassis (including the mainboard, keyboard, and even display), which made it seem like too costly and risky a procedure.

Akina

This machine was a very fast machine for its time. It had one of the first 64-bit Athlon CPUs: an Athlon 64_3200+, running an an MSI MS-6471 mainboard, which made it sail through whatever you asked it to do.
It had 2x 512MB DIMMs, one of which developed problems early in the machine's life.

It had the fastest video card available at the time: an ATI-branded Radeon 9800XT.

The machine was quite unreliable - especially in its early days. The manufacturer equipped it with with two DiamondMax 160GB ATA drives, which always seemed to give problems. At one point, it lost quite a lot of data, including a lot of sprites for X-Bomber the Game.

The ATA drives were supplemented and ultimately replaced with SATA drives, including a 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11/12, which had to be RMA'd a few times, plus a 320GB Samsung Spinpoint T166, which I took out of the external hard drive that I picked up in Germany.

Since the machine had so many optical drive bays, I decided to use two of them to install an Antec Veris Premier front bay device, which included a very multifunctional remote, and was a great solution for turning the machine into a media center.

I replaced the MSI board with a Foxconn 760GXK8MC-RS.
When the machine needed more than two SATA ports, the Foxconn was replaced with an ASUS K8N-E Deluxe mainboard.

The 9800XT eventually became a bottleneck and, by that time, almost all GPUs were made as PCI-Express cards.
Practically the only exception was the HiS Radeon HD 4670, which they decided to make with an AGP 8x connector, to make backward compatibility with AGP mainboards a selling point.
This GPU was really quite fast: extending the useful life of the machine by a good few years, and it came with a distinctive translucent white and blue cover.

Rangiku

This was my first laptop. For my year working abroad in Germany, I wanted to be fully-loaded to work on X-Bomber the Game away from home.

Rangiku was one of the first batch of X770s that Rock shipped out.
It had a Core2Duo T7700, which was the fastest mobile CPU available at the time, and 2 x 1GB 800MHz RAM.
Since the machine needed to be as reliable as possible, I asked the OEM to throw on Windows XP Pro, rather than Vista Home Premium.
There was no point in giving it 4GB since XP didn't fully address that amount.
With the machine being designed for Vista and running XP, it was unbelievably fast.

The graphics card was a GeForce Go 7950 GTX. If I hadn't needed the machine in time to go abroad, I would've waited for the 8800GTX with DirectX 10 to become available.
Although the GPUs were MXM modules, the original X770 mainboards didn't play well with the later 8800 cards, so it was never upgraded.
That didn't matter because the 7950 was a wild performer.
The housemates in Germany were a bit surprised to see a laptop running Crysis smoothly at full settings.

The machine had a cool, orange trim that set it apart nicely. Airport security were always very interested in the machine.
The display was a beautiful 1200p glossy 'X-Glass' panel, which drew a lot of positive comments.

Internal storage was limited to a 160GB Momentus 7200.2, which I later swapped for a 500GB 7200.4 with G-Force protection.

Katie

This machine was an Athlon 800, running on an MSI MS-6167 board with 256MB RAM.
It had a Riva TNT2 64 GPU and it played a very mean game of Quake III Arena.

The machine ran Windows 98 SE from a 30GB disk, and had a Soundblaster Live 1024, which Akina later inherited.
The machine came with a 20" Syncmaster and had some neat other peripherals, including an Epson 2450 Photo scanner, a Sidewinder gamepad and Force Feedback 2 joystick.

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