ASUS Xtreme Design competition-

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Paint:
Added some gloss black spray paint for the front face area (which you will see in a Home theater environment),
pardon the tape still on there that's being used for masking...
looks like reflective 'piano black':


Her you can see the effect of putting gloss paint behind acrylic (painting the inside):
Notice how the paint in the foreground is glossy piano black,
in the background you can see the actual gloss black paint on the inside isn't as glossy,
but the clear acrylic adds a ton of depth and gloss to some cheapo Pep Boys automotive spray paint:



Wire management
Before
This system has 8x 128GB SSDs in it, so the power and signal cabling can get kind of out of hand-
the Antec stock SATA modular connectors used 3x cables and power connectors on the PSU to feed all 8 SSD drives:


After
Added some badly needed wire management;
Swapped the longer SATA cables (maybe 18" long) for some short 8" SATA cables,
Created a single modular PSU connector from the Antec modular connectors,
feeds 8 SATA power connectors that are perfectly spaced so that they actually hold the SSDs together without any wire slack between them:


Front face look after painting:
I put a piece of paper in front of the fans to mask the LED fans,
simulating (light-wise) how it will look after I put the black mesh foam filter in there;
It should have a back glow behind the filter, as well as some light seepage around the clear edges out of the bottom and top of the case.
It will keep the case from being too bright in your face,
while letting you know there's something powerful lurking in there:

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I did some idle power consumption tests using the ASUS Softwares,
using the Kill-a-watt power consumption meter (measures at the plug)


Baseline power consumption:
143 Watts

After adding EPU-6
(reduces Bclk and CPU voltage slightly more than Intel Speedstep):
137 Watts

After turning T.Probe to power savings mode
(uses 8 VRMs/voltage regulators under idle conditions, 32 VRMs under full load conditions):
133 Watts

After installing Smart Doctor v5.49, allows EPU-6 to control the video card power as well:
130 Watts

That's about a 9% decrease in idle power consumption,
just from ASUS software tuning using the Xtreme Hybrid Design technologies.

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Amazing how a 65" HDTV can still make a new 50" Plasma look small...