Many of you are no doubt familiar with Highspeed PC as THE place to go for Innovatek water cooling gear. I purchased my first honest to goodness store bought water block from Highspeed, as well as many more items over the years. Several years later, I'm still into water cooling and Scott Brown and his crew at Highspeed are still offering a quality product at reasonable prices and backing it up with simply outstanding customer service. I have and will continue to give Highspeed my highest recommendation and it seems others would agree, they have a 9.88 customer rating at resellerratings.com.

In addition to a vast selection of Innovatek gear, another item Highspeed PC has carried in the past was the hard to find Senfu Tech Station, or as it was known elsewhere, the Senfu Over clocking DIY House. (snicker) We'll stick with Tech Station. The idea is a simple one, take all the components of a computer out of a case and put them somewhere where it's much easier to tweak, over clock, swap out components and otherwise fiddle about to your hearts content with your hardware. A tech station is especially useful to hardware tech's and ahem ...reviewers of computer hardware. The Senfu station was a simple metal frame with plexiglas shelves and a rubber mat and it did the job well enough. But like Senfu's water cooling gear before it; it has gone the way of the dinosaur. Today you won't find a single hit on Froogle for the venerable Senfu station, so what's a hard core geek to do?

Fortunately Highspeed PC stepped in to fill the void. They not only built a tech station, they built a better tech station, and have continued to improve on the design since its inception. Instead of a metal frame, Highspeed opted for various non-conductive plastics. The only metal in the HSPC tech station are the screws used to hold it together. And rather than relying on gravity to hold components in place, the HSPC station uses a rubber stand-off system that can be secured with a couple of nylon wing nuts, a plexiglas rail system for drives and a agp/pci rail to keeps cards in place.

Package

Today we are looking at a pre-release updated version of the Standard Tech Station. And if you like what you see, you won't have long to wait, the new model should be for sale soon. Improvements include:

-Wider platform for full coverage of most ATX motherboards (no motherboard overhang): current version: 14x8", updated version: 14x9.5"
-Neoprene rubber mat for the top shelf, replacing the self-stick rubber pads. The neoprene makes for a nice non-slip surface for optical drives and PSU. (also makes a good non-conductive electronic work surface.)
-Improved assembly instructions.
-The fan has been moved out to allow for more clearance for large heat sinks, etc.

The package appears to be bullet proof. Well maybe not bullet proof, but if Attila the UPS guy is going to hurt the contents of this package he better bring help. All the parts are placed in bubble wrap, and then placed in a sturdy box. The box is then placed inside yet another box and surrounded with pink (ack) peanuts. Despite my distaste for packing peanuts and their uncanny ability to continue to show up months after you've unpacked a parcel, the box within a box made it easy to avoid an unfortunate pink incident. The peanuts are now safely where they belong, in a garbage can, and I can put off vacuuming for at least another day.