This was not, however, a contest to see who could be cutesy like the PC's with the big round ears. Nor were the contestants trying to make PC's octogenarian-friendly.
It was essentially a "How would you dress up your Hot-Rod?" type of event.
You see, the enthusiast PC world is similar in many ways to the Hot-Rod or Tuner cultures. Although the skirmishes aren't exactly over Horsepower vs. Torque or even Supercharged vs. Turbo; they still look at who has the best gear, the fastest rig, and the best timed results. And in some ways the parallels go to the same extremes that you would see at the SEMA show. Such as: instead of temporarily boosting your HP by using NOS, how about running your pc at 6ghz using Liquid Nitrogen? Or, rather than Supercharge your V8 for more power throughout it's range, how about plumbing your PC with water lines to run it at a constant 4.5ghz rather than the paltry 2.4 it started at?
Basically it comes down to this: pushing equipment and budgets to the extreme for status, bragging rights, and just plain fun. Regardless of whether it is Mechanical, Electrical, Cosmetic, or even Theoretical; the members of these communities constantly strive to exceed the records that others have set.
So, with this in mind, I set about trying to meet the competition design goals, and still turn out something that was not a "beige box".
Here are some of the pictures I created during the initial design process.... ( click on the pictures for full-size versions )
Before I even posted these to the competition website, I realized that it wouldn't be enough to just put these pictures out there. I would have to show exactly how everything needed for a High Performance Computing Platform was going to fit.
So after a lot of work, and the material assistance of the many people that contributed to the Sketchup Components Collection, I generated these pictures::
For those out there wondering what they are looking at, The first picture is with the front doors closed, and one rear door open to show the mesh allowing airflow. The second picture shows an EVGA SR2 Motherboard mounted in the case. The motherboard is loaded with 4 ATI 5870 Video Cards that are being cooled by EK Waterblocks, 2 Intel Xeon 5600 Processors being cooled by DangerDen cpu coolers, 12 sticks of Corsair RAM being cooled by Koolance ram coolers, and further chipset cooling and reservoirs by EK Waterblocks.
The hard drive carriers are my own design. They allow for the mounting of 2.5", 3.5", and 5.25" devices. They feature forced-air cooling and vibration dampening. The fan controllers mounted in the right side carrier are made by Lamptron.
The third picture is from the back, with the doors open, and shows 4 120mm x 480mm radiators made by The Feser Company.
The next 2 pictures are not for the faint of heart ( or budget ). They feature a Motherboard tray designed to carry 12 Mini-ITX mainboards. Using off-the-shelf Mainboards/CPU/RAM this case could be configured with up to 72 cores or up to 96GB of RAM. Or, if budget is not an issue, and power is the goal, the case can be configured with up to 144 cores and 1.5TB of RAM by using server grade hardware. If the goal is data storage, then 90TB of storage could be achieved utilizing the right components.
The last two pictures show a side-by-side size comparison to a case that is almost legendary - the SilverStone TJ07. As you can see, although the case is larger than a typical pc case, it is still small enough to fit under a desk.
