I know the fans on the side are LED, but I think you can turn them off some how. It's lookin' like a really good case, especially with the airflow and the cooling of 2 x 250mm fans. Well ventilated too, with the ventilation holes on the other side, along with a 120mm fan for exhaust at the back.
To add another side to this discussion, couldnt he just buy a 8800GTX, and softmod it to be a top of the line quadro, that would normally be much more? I have herad about people doing this before.
Yup, this is exactly what I am doing. 8xxx series cards use the same gpu as the quadro fx 5xxx series cards. The quadros just have better drivers and support. Theres also some features on the gaming cards like overlay that are disabled that you will want for maya/3dsmax and theres was of enabling it.
I knew I had a bad feeling about the motherboard. I needed to tatoo the BIOS so my SATA Rom and HDs would work with it. I even needed to bring it into Geek squad to have them help me fix this.
This computer gave me more of a pain in the fanny than any other computer I've ever made. And still is please go (HERE for new thread)
Edit: Another thing about the MOBO. There isn't any sensor for the CPU. So if it over heats there no warning. But in BIOS there is a guide where you can enable a warning even though theres no sensor..... strange....
i cant believe you called the geek squad and payed money for help, when 75 percent of the people on here know 10x as much about computers then the geek squad