Reviewing computer hardware is always an interesting job, as the computer industry is the most rapidly changing industry there is. That said, I am always being presented with new and exciting hardware and sometimes picking one product over another is hard work. Despite having a wide range of the latest and greatest hardware available at my disposal I very rarely upgrade my own system, as the hardware I have generally gets kept for further testing and future comparisons. However, every now and then I become so inspired by a product that I can no longer resist the urge to upgrade.

With the recent arrival of the Intel Core 2 Duo platform I felt the time to upgrade was now. Given I have a number of motherboards that support this processor and some spare DDR2 memory handy, there was no reason why I shouldn’t purchase a Core 2 Duo processor. However, in the end I held off purchasing a new Core 2 Duo and went with something a little less powerful, which I will get to shortly. Why did I do this you might ask, well because for work a Core 2 Duo was not entirely necessary and the solution I came up with could not accommodate for this processor.

Furthermore what was I to do with my existing AMD Athlon64 3800+ (AM2) system that I was currently using? Although this system does not deliver performance comparable to that of the Core 2 Duo platform, it was still very new and very capable. Therefore I wanted to keep this system primarily for gaming. The obvious choice here was to build two separate systems, one dedicated to gaming and the other work. However, I did not want to sacrifice and desktop space to do so and I would have ideally liked to use both systems on my Samsung LCD, as there was certainly no room for another 26” monitor.

Therefore, when I heard about the new Thermaltake Mozart Tx case, designed to house two separate systems, I was keen to try it out. While this is not a comprehensive review of the Mozart Tx case I would just like to do a quick preliminary preview of this case and a few modifications that I have made to it. Although the Thermaltake Mozart Tx is said to be able to accommodate two separate computers, there are limitations. For example, the case can only house a single ATX power supply, along with a single ATX motherboard. The second must be a VIA Mini-ITX system which is powered by a custom built Thermaltake 5.25” power supply; an optional extra for this case.

This means the Mozart Tx is kind of limited in its dual computer support, as I would consider the VIA Mini-ITX half a system really. Sure it can carry out most office based tasks, but I like to do a lot at once and I like to do these tasks quickly and smoothly, something I am not sure even a 2GHz VIA processor can do. Image editing and video editing for example would most likely create too much of a challenge for such a platform. Therefore, if I was going to use the Mozart Tx modifications were going to be necessary, but what could I put in place of a Mini-ITX motherboard?

Well, as luck had it a Gigabyte Pico-BTX motherboard fit the bill perfectly and was just what I needed to kick the Mini-ITX option to the curve. Even better, I was able to make use of some of the wasted space in the Mozart Tx and gear it up with a second 700watt power supply. So now, rather than the mild VIA Mini-ITX platform, I have a 3.46GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor with 2GB’s of Corsair memory sitting in the right hand side of the Mozart Tx. Opposite this I have an ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard fitted with an overclocked Athlon64 3800+ and 2GB of Corsair memory.