Packaging

The Avenger rolled into town in a plain brown system box.

Underneath the top flap, we find a glimpse of the foam brackets that cushion the system during transit, as well as the MSI motherboard packaging, which has been repurposed as the accessories box.

As we dig deeper, we see that V3 has also reused the Antec "Twelve Hundred" chassis packaging for the inner box.

Freed from its cardboard and foam prison, we get our first look at the Avenger. Using a combination of matte and glossy textures along with a clear window, gives the system a sleek, monochromatic appearance.

V3 has applied vinyl logo decals on both sides of the chassis to spruce it up a bit.

The full ATX chassis has plenty of room inside and no shortage of fans, including the large 200mm one on top.

The Blu-ray drive occupies the uppermost optical bay. Just above that we have the front I/O, which consists of two USB 2.0 ports, an eSATA port, and mic & headphone jacks.

Rear I/O consists of PS/2 keyboard and mouse inputs, optical and coaxial S/PDIF outs, 2xUSB2.0, 2xSATA, FireWire, 2xUSB3.0, Ethernet, and multi-channel analog audio outs. Each of the three GPUs have DVI and HDMI outs.

Internals

Inside we see the Asetek liquid CPU cooler and radiator, as well as the three ZOTAC GTX 480 GPUs stacked on top of one another. Even with four physical hard drives installed, there's still room for more. The components are all hooked up with a nice, tidy wiring job - something we definitely expect to see in a system from a boutique builder.

Documentation & Accessories

The accessories box contained a few cables and the manuals for several of the internal components.

A black binder contained a ZOTAC driver disc and a disc of DirectX 11 and CUDA technology demos, as well as an invoice and Steam download coupons for Mafia II and Napoleon: Total War.

For this review, V3 and ASUS provided us with a very nice ASUS VG236 23-inch 120MHz 3D-ready LCD monitor and an nVIDIA 3D Vision Kit.

The 3D Vision kit includes the rechargeable glasses, two USB cables, transmitter, documentation, and two extra nosepieces for the glasses.