I'm curious about the airflow on these fans: do they suck in and vent out both through the backside black heat sinks, or is air sucked in through the bottom-side openings (through which you see the fan blades on the pictures) then forced out through the heat sink ?

If the second is true, I'd imagine the fans are generating an "in" airflow all over the motherboard (between the mobo and underside plate), using every available crack in the case joints as intake, which presumably means it will build up a fat air dust crust all over the components in no time.

If the fans both intake and exhaust mainly through the rear ports/heatsinks, how is the rest of the machine cooled (besides CPU and GPUs) ?

Oops, I noobed: see comment mistakenly posted in step 9, please.

Would it be possible to replace the annoying slot-in superdrive with another SATA storage device (say, a 500GB HDD) ?

- Would there be enough headroom (9.5mm or better) ?

- What connector/part to use ? Would the existing SuperDrive connector fit a SSD or HDD ?

- How challenging would it be to secure a 2.5" mass storage device in the SuperDrive emplacement ?

Thanks for any help with this, I'm about to buy one of those laptops, and my experience with slot-in drives encourages me to consider alternative uses for that wasted space in the shell. :)

Come to think of it... an extra fan in there couldn't hurt: I'm told the 9600GT tends to run hot, and I'm going for the 2.93GHz version of the processor.