Silverstone TJ09 & Smooth Creations

“One luscious chassis decked out to the nines, to make any geek’s mouth water”

You don’t put Puff Daddy and his entourage up in a one-room studio for the night, and we sure as hell aren’t going to put Dream Machine and all its glamorous hardware in anything less than the baddest, bitchinest enclosure available. This year, that enclosure is the soon-to-be-released Silverstone TJ09 full-tower. And even though the case was positively striking in stock trim, we went ahead and sent it to the wizards at Smooth Creations for a custom paint job. The result is a case so seductive it could easily be the centerfold in Playrig magazine, if there were such a thing.

The TJ09 has big shoes to fill, and it fills them admirably. We used its predecessor, the TJ07, for last year’s Dream Machine, and it swallowed over $10K of hardware without flinching. The TJ09 is just as capable, despite being a tad smaller than its predecessor, and it’s the only fulltower on the market that’s new enough, big enough, and sexy enough to take on DM2006. Naturally, it has all the dreamy requisite extras, including a slide-out motherboard tray, the copious cooling of five 12cm fans, and room for six hard drives, a PSU of any dimensions, and all our sundry other gear.

The most interesting aspect of its design is the large ventilation chamber in the lower portion of the case, which allows cool air from outside to be sucked into the case’s gaping maw via a 12cm fan positioned at the gap’s entrance. And the paint job? Well, what’s to say other than that it costs $800 and is worth every cent. You truly have to see a Smooth Creations paint job in person to appreciate its profound wow-factor. It all amounts to an enclosure that’s as audacious as its innards.