Commodore XX - First look

Posted at: 2:50am 9th August 2007 by Ben Hardwidge

We take a look at Commodore's new gaming PC, which features a TEC cooling system and a great custom paint job

After years of being rudely plastered on everything from Escom sound cards to packs of CD-Rs, the classic Commodore logo is finally back in the land of home computers where it belongs. Yes, this time the owner of the distinctive retro brand wants to follow on from the Amiga and Commodore 64 by making Commodore a big name in computer games again. The result is the Commodore Gaming PC range, which promises to redefine the 'line between gaming and reality'.

While this piece of particularly rubbish marketing speak suggests that Commodore is, in fact, full of something brown and smelly, Commodore is thankfully doing much more than just tagging its name on a standard case and filling it with top-end components.

Of course, the XX's most striking feature is its expert paint job and, while the pixellated yellow 'Jupiter Lander' design on this model might not be to some people's taste, there's a whole range of alternative skins from which to choose. In fact, Commodore has recently approached guerrilla graffiti artist Banksy to design a one-off skin (or C-Kin, as Commodore calls them) for a charity auction. Unlike your usual airbrushed paint job, Commodore uses a painting technique similar to that used in cars, in which a foil print is burned into the metal in an oven, so that the paint job effectively becomes part of the case. The paint is then coated with a scratchproof lacquer, so there's very little chance of you damaging it.

There are some other useful touches to the XX's design though. Firstly, the full door on the front allows the skin to cover the whole of the front of the case. It also opens 270 degrees, so it's flush with the side of the case. We've already seen this on Antec's P180 cases, and it's a nice touch that lowers the risk of you breaking off the front door. Not only that, but there's also a gap between the door on the front of the case, which allows you to thread cables to the front-mounted USB ports, and it also allows air to flow through to the front intake fan, even when the door is closed.

While we're on the subject of airflow, it's hard not to notice the whopping 250mm fan underneath the Commodore-logo mesh on the side panel, which can shift an enormous amount of air at a lower speed than standard 120mm and 80mm fans. However, it's worth noting that the Commodore PC was extremely noisy when we were testing it in the lab, so you may want to employ some fan controllers to get the most out of the airflow system.

The most interesting feature of this PC, however, is the internal cooling system, which has a TEC underneath the 850W ICE Cube power supply. The hot side of the TEC is fixed to the PSU, where the heat is removed by the PSU's fans, while the cold side connects to copper heatpipes that go to a small heatsink in front of the CPU cooler. This means that any air drawn into the CPU cooler is cooled by the other heatsink, which is positioned at an angle so that it helps to cool the 2GB of Corsair Dominator memory too. Taco van Sambeek from Commodore told Custom PC that this helps cool the air to 7-8 degrees C.