SYS Technologies Cold Fusion 1000 - Athlon 1GHz

As if the fact that the CPU is isolated from the rest of the case wasn't enough, SYS went the extra mile (something we here at AnandTech love to see) and included round IDE cables for the CDROM and floppy drives. The round cables take up less space and thus are less of an obstruction to air, allowing for free airflow throughout the case. The round cables are made by cutting up a regular IDE cable into its individual wires and twisting those wires into a round cable.

Unfortunately there has yet to be a company to make round IDE cables for Ultra ATA 66 drives simply because the individual wires within a Ultra ATA 66 cable are very close together. Because of this, the two hard drives attached to the FastTrack66 controller use the regular Ultra ATA 66 cables. Sometimes it's the little things that make the company, and in this case, SYS is showing us exactly how much attention to detail they have.

Modem, Keyboard and Mouse

The peripheral that SYS included with the Cold Fusion 1000 which we found most surprising was the Lucent 56K PCI Winmodem.  Although the modem features native driver support under Windows 2000, from a professional level system like the Cold Fusion 1000, we expected them to ditch the modem all together and put that PCI slot to better use with an Ethernet card.  Taking away the Winmodem (-$25) and adding a 3Com 3C905TX 10/100Mbit PCI Ethernet card (+$50) will set you back another $25 but should be well worth the added cost for most users that would be considering this system.

SYS provides their own generic 104-Key PS/2 Keyboard with the Cold Fusion 1000 and outfitted our system with a Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer.  For those of you that aren’t familiar with the Intellimouse Explorer, it makes use of Microsoft’s Intellieye that tracks the surface it is moving over instead of the conventional method of using the ball inside of a mouse to move X and Y rollers around. 

This method provides for a much smoother motion because it prevents the collection and buildup of dirt around the rollers of conventional ball mice, but some hard core gamers have complained that if you make a sudden move with the mouse the eye cannot keep up with the movement and thus incorrectly moves the pointer on the screen.  This problem does exist and you can run into it if you simply take the mouse and move it quickly to one side.  A simple way to avoid this problem is by setting your mouse sensitivity to a high enough level that a small movement of the mouse results in a large movement across the screen.  At the same time the Intellimouse Explorer is considerably larger than the regular Intellimouse and thus can feel awkward and even painful if your hands aren’t used to such a large pointing device.  Your best bet is to go down to a local Best Buy or other store that will let you try out the Intellimouse Explorer and see how it feels in your hands  If it isn’t too comfortable, then you probably won’t enjoy it too much.  Luckily MS does offer an Intellimouse with the Intellieye which is pretty much the regular Intellimouse without the ball.