HSPC Large Top Deck Tech Station

Introduction:

    Back in March I received the HighSpeed PC Large Tech Station. After opening up the box, building the Tech Station, and looking it over, I felt I could do more to improve the setup. With some minor modifications, I felt I improved the Tech Station 10-fold. As a matter of fact, some of the things I did to the Tech Station were some of the same things the original designer had intentions of doing in his next release. This motivated him, and in a few months time the owner made improvements on his previous design.

   I received his newly designed and improved Tech Station called the "Top Deck," and I'm going to see if I can or need to mod it. The HSPC Top Deck Tech Station is modeled after HSPC Large Tech Station. The differences between the two are the Top Deck mounts the motherboard on the upper tier and also supports MATX-style motherboards. The Top Deck is also available in 6 colors, just like the other tech stations.

Packaging:

Retail Box	Retail label
Protection	Control Kit

     The Tech Stations can be purchased either fully assembled or in a kit form. Mine arrived in kit form, and was packaged in a white box that wasn't very big at all. After opening up the package, everything was together and wrapped in bubble wrap; nothing was free floating around in the box which is a good thing.

Top Deck:

    In the words of HSPC:

Perfect for the frequent PC Upgrader, Builder, or IT Professional. The Tech Station offers easy access to computer hardware that was once buried inside the traditional computer case. Testing and upgrading has never been easier!

Box contents	Posts, rails and hardware
The 2 levels	120mm Evercool fan

    Building the Top Deck is a very simple process made even easier with the included instructions. Start off by clearing a large enough area to easily work in and lay out the parts. I'm not going to give step by step instructions in building the Top Deck since detailed instructions are included and the process is very, very simple.

   After the Top Tech has been constructed, you have a very stable platform to work from. With the motherboard being mounted on the top tier versus the lower tier, this gives the end user all the room needed to play with jumper settings or mount larger heat-sinks without having to bend your neck sideways to see what you are doing.

   Also included is the ATX Control Kit this kit comes with a power and reset buttons along with power and HDD LEDs. These items plug into the motherboard front panel header.

   On the under side of the top tier are a set of hard drive rails. Two hard drives can slide in without any problems, and more rails can be ordered and mounted to the Tech Station if additional drives need to be used.

   For the folks who read my modding the Tech Station article, you may remember that I added larger spacers to the rails so I could mount an optical drive to the underside of the upper tier. Sadly, I must say they didn't incorporate this into their new design, so instead the optical drive needs to be to placed on the lower tier along with the power supply.

    Another change made to the Top Deck was the fan layout. The original Tech Station included two 120mm fans. The Top Deck includes only one 120mm fan. The fan is mid-mounted and rotated 45° in the upper tier. This setup allows one fan to cool the upper and lower tiers. Unfortunately, this setup only blows some air across the motherboard and the hard drives, and nothing for the power supply or optical drive.

Fan installed