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SVC CCFL Kit Review
Date : Sunday 23 March 2003
Author : GrAssHoppA
Provided By : SVC

SVC CCFL in Blue, Red, and UV

Introduction

Hello, and welcome to another review, this time around I have the privilege of getting my hands on some CCFL kits by SVC. As most of you probably already know SVC stands for Silicon Valley Compucycle, they are a nicely designed online store selling everything from Case Badges to Watercooling kits. Out of their nice selection of inventory they sent me some of their CCFL kits, I received a blue and red CCFL kit, they also sent me an extra blue and red CCFL tube, and then 2 UV tubes for a total of 6 CCFL's. All of their standard kits come with the CCFL, a single inverter that is able to receive two CCFL tubes, a front mounted switch, Velcro to mount the inverter, and two mounts to attach the CCFL to your case. They also have a sound activated inverter with super bright LED, I didn't receive one of these for review but they do look pretty cool. I also had 2 Sunbeam CCFL tubes laying around so I will show you a small comparison of the SVC CCFL to the Sunbeam CCFL

Ohhh, nice lookin

Sexy Boxes

All laid out

Product Specs

Well, the installation of this particular CCFL kit doesn't differ much from most other CCFL kits floating around. The only "real" difference is that the inverter has a plastic shell around it that must be removed if you plan on installing more than one CCFL tube on the inverter. Nodon't get me wrong, that's not really that bad, unless your like me and accidentally touch two of the solder points on the bottom of the inverter and get **ZAPPED**. Yes the almighty GrAssHoppA got his middle finger on his right hand zapped. Now getting zapped really isnt that fun, my heartrate went from about 60, to a whopping 240 in about 1/8th of a second, then after I decided that I wasn't having a legitimate heart attack I stood back up and muttered a few "choice" words under my breath and continued the installation of my SVC CCFL kit into my case.

After my "life altering" experience with the inverter, I decided to quit playing around and plug in one of the blue CCFL tubes into the inverter in one of the two CCFL tube plugs located at the end of the inverter. After I got it plugged in, I put the protective plastic case back on and install that bad-boy into my case. I already had some CCFL tube mounts on the top of my case so I didn't use the ones provided because what am I going to do with four CCFL mounts on the top of my case.

Now as most of you probably know I happen to own a LianLi PC71 server tower which takes TONS of light to get that thing lit up. I usually put two CCFL tubes in that case because of it's shear size. When SVC sent me this kit I received two blue CCFL tubes and I has hoped on installing both of them into this particular case but when I pulled the second blue one out it felt the need to break. Yes, my other blue CCFL was broken right out of the box, it wasn't totally a loss, the CCFL was still intact just the top where the wire connects to the CCFL was broken, the CCFL still worked for the most part it just didn't put off as much light as the one that wasn't broken.

Now, if a broken blue CCFL tube wasn't bad enough, I also had some issues with one of the UV CCFL tubes they sent me. It wasn't broken like the blue one was, it for some reason had some "issues" it wouldn't go to full power and it sent a wicked EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) around my room which caused my stereo to distort while it was powered on and it also caused the picture on my computer monitor to go absolutely crazy. As you can probably imagine I didn't keep that one on for more than about 15 sec while I snapped a quick shot.

Whew, now that all my installation troubles have passes I finally got the CCFL kit mounted into my case and switched it on. To my surprise just the single Blue CCFL lit my huge case up quite nicely. Before I show you any pictures I have to let you know that any and every light and LED in my case is blue, now I am talking EVERYTHING, my GPU cooler, rounded cables, heck, even the screen on my LCD is blue (if you haven't figured out yet, blue is my favorite color). So I wanted something with a nice dark blue color to match everything else. Well I fired the CCFL up and it didn't quite live up to my expectation, it was more of an "aqua" color than the dark blue I was looking for, I was a little disappointed but at the same time I was pretty excited because I finally found a company that makes a CCFL bright enough to light up my huge LianLi PC71 server tower with a single CCFL tube.

I had a little bit of time to kill so I dusted off some Sunbeam CCFL's I had floating around for a short comparison of them to SVC. First lets start by laying the CCFL's out next to each other, I just happened to have a Blue Sunbeam CCFL so it works out perfectly. With a closer inspection of both CCFL tubes I noticed that the quality of the two brands is very close, it looks as both companies use similar techniques to manufacture their CCFL tubes. When the two tubes are next to each other the only difference is the plastic casing around the CCFL. Sunbeam uses a mostly clear plastic with blue lines running vertically up the tube, while on the other hand SVC uses a tube which is fully colored in blue. I don't know if that made such the big difference in the color they both put out when lit up. But I will let you decide which you like better.

Well, that time has come again, it's time for my review to come to an end, I know it's a sad moment for all you loyal VH readers, but all good things come to an end. Before I go Ive got some final pics to tickle your fancy.

To finish this thing off, I would highly recommend the SVC CCFL Kit to anybody, they make high quality products, and as you can clearly see in the above picture that the color of the CCFL tubes is awesome. Although they don't have the "true" color that some of the sunbeam CCFL tubes have, they do make up for it in shear brightness. The kit costs $10.99 and that includes everything, they also sell individual CCFL tubes for a low price of $4.99, they even have some of the Bi and Tri color CCFL's so go check them out.