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Clear Case Roundup
The Cheat writes "Interested in making your computer the envy of all the other computers on the
block? What visitors to oooh and ahhh when they enter your room? The latest trend
in computer case solutions can do just that. AnandTech took a look at three clear
cases in a recent roundup,
each certain to make you more popular, right? Maybe not, but at least they look
cool."
scare any and all females from ever entering my bedroom again.
There's a reason cases are made of metal. EM SHIELDING!
Geek chic is coming into popularity. The other kids at my high school are very impressed with the various case detailing methods, and especially enjoy such companies as Alienware, who has now replaced Dell as the system "to have".
When they make a clear CPU and invisible hard drive, then I'll hop on the trend bandwagon.
A light and durable case is more important to me than one that you can see into. If I want to see my ribbon cables and motherboard, I can leave the side off.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Did any else misread that headline and think it was going to be a product review of Rational's ClearCase software products?
There is no way I'd buy one of these cases...or one with a window.
:)
There's a reason for all the EMI shielding in a case! And the reason? Search google
I have to wonder what the FCC says about these cases...although for Home use I don't believe there is much in terms of requirements.
Colossians 2:8
Are there any neat things you would like to see in a case?
This.
...that if you think these look cool; you needn't fear being 'popular'. ;)
(damn, did I forget my humor tags?)
What do you mean, "again"?
Sean
WARNING: This product is meant for education purposes only. It is unknown how much protection it provides EMR (electromagnetic radiation), if it provides any protection at all.
This warning trails all of their clear case descriptions... Anyone have any definitive info on this?
each certain to make you more popular, right?
And just a touch more cancerous!!
Seriously, these things are neat, and when they make a model that doesnt' need cleaning after a days use I'll gladly irradiate myself.
...is a completely clear notebook. :)
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
Funny that no one mentions that these things let out all emissions from the electronics, which is a Bad Thing. I'm sure that the manufacturers have the standard disclaimers about only using the cases for display purposes, wink, nod.
The review even mentions a problem with one case's "EMI Shield". Um, no, that thing isn't stopping any EMI, sorry.
So I'm sure that at least a few modder kiddies have had to stop using their case to stop messing with Mom and Dad's TV, wireless phone, 802.11b setup, etc (especially those running 2.4ghz processors).
How about a case that has some kind of metal mesh embedded or sandwiched in the material, ala safety glass? It'd probably look better, too.
Sure, these look really cool. And to be honest, I wouldn't mind having a nice clear case and all. But, is it entirely necessary? My case currently resides on the floor between my desk and my roommates desk in my dorm room. From what I've seen, most cases sit on the floor next to a desk, no? A nice looking case is good and all, but is it practical? I'd rather spend the extra money and buy extra hard drives, etc., something that serves a better function then "looking cool". I mean, it's like buying an old, beat-up car with no engine, and giving it a spoiler, racing stripes, etc. But hey, if someone gave me a check for a few hundred dollars, and I had nothing to spend it on, a clear case would be nice.
take off every sig for great justice
Computer cases haven't changed a whole lot in the last 5 years ever since they discovered the stylish case market. Trends have changed a little, windowed cases and flat black designs are popular. I would like to see more truly innovative designs like the Shuttle PCs and other stylish cases with a purpose.
...standard, stackable rectangular prism, ATX or mini-ATX with easy-to-remove steel sides.
Almost all of our development machines use a Clear Case--it's definitely popular where I work. I told management that the difference was mostly just eye candy, and that Bitkeeper would do just fine (and be more scalable, at that). But, instead, they oooh'ed and aaah'ed over it, just like the slashdot posting said they would.
I think The Cheat tried to tell me about this earlier today but I couldn't understand a word he was saying.
NO CARRIER
Can anyone else figure out what this has to do with this topic?
NickPatrick.com
Is this what passes for tech break throughs now days?
The money, the alcohol, the women, the secret enemy fortresses, oh wait, I'm thinking of James Bond...
;)
Any case modder I know doesn't really have a life, other than Lan Parties.
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
clear car hood
You know what this means? Now you have to clean whatever dirt a solid case/hood would have hidden... I guess this doesn't matter too much to people who buy new hardware every four months though...
boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse
Yes, I stare at the inside of the computer from time to time.
It'd be so cool if there were transparant laptop case. Now, that's cool Better yet, transparant CD/DVD drive casing so that you can spot the laser. Imagine how cool it is to have that sort of laptop in the dark!!!!!!
Black Light, some lava lamp should be a must have!!!!!!
mod
It's ASDFing to the Ultra!!!!!
What does it have to do with the topic? I can understand that you are happy you are through with Windows but there are plenty of chances in /. to brag about Linux so take it to a more appropriate subject.
The fact that you have a family proves that there is another wonderful free something (hint: not linux)
I mean, the Mac portables are tres passe'.
I want something with lexan and neon and tubes and bubbles and shit.
Your lame attempts at trolling only make your penis smaller.
ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!
mod this down...
To me this is a classic case of flash over substance. Why pay the extra for a window/lights/rounded cables when that money can be put into a faster CPU, a better video card, or a bigger hard drive? It reminds me of the people who buy a cheap ass Honda then trick it out with everything they can bolt on only to have their doors blown off by a stock Camaro SS which costs less.
Whoop-tee-dee you have LCD's on your fan, I can push twice the fps you can and will procede to hand you your ass in tournament play. Just a thought.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -RAH
Us Alpha Nerds don't use cases. We just lay our motherboards down on cardboard pizza delivery boxes. Clear computer cases are for posers.
not funy pls work on since of humor thx
You want to pimp out your case? Just take a drill with different size drill bits, and create a funky crop circle on the front, or side, or whatever. Cheap solution.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
Macs already come bundled with frilly gayness. No need for add-ons.
Looking at the photos, these cases don't have any good EMF shielding. Since the components inside tend to be pretty noisy on the EM spectrum, these cases could probably cause some pretty impressive interfearance on an old style TV nearby.
Test your net with Netalyzr
These cases are clearly the right choice.
I hear just a little dust makes these look bad, and it needs regular cleaning. Something to keep in mind.
Not for me but whatever floats your boat.
These are so generic, any self respecting modder does all his mods custom--the idea is something UNIQUE, not a imac clone piece of crap.
Oh and btw, if it doesn't have a 1U/2U/3U/4U designation in the title, I want to part of it.
you could see how much dust the fans actually suck in? Firgure out the amount of time it takes a dust bunny to form? Observe housing structures and construction techniques for the local spider population? Throw perfectly good beer money away buying lights, blinking fans, etc? See what color of smoke actually comes out of the cpu from overclocking? Gain a little EMR? Buying a PERL book would be way more useful and beneficial.....just my 2 cents..
This has got to be one of the dumbest comments I've seen on slashdot, and that's saying something.
At current frequencies, you're looking at basically a microwave transmitter inside the case. And how many watts of power are the CPU's today putting out? Hmm?
I do hope you're not putting one of these things next to your legs. Heh.
These cases are simply a matter of Darwinian selection in action.
Upgrade to Windows XP now
Buy Windows XP online at Amazon UK! No more PC crashes. (Affiliate)
What about static electricity? Acrylic just loves to build up static. Even small amounts of static electricity, too small to be felt by human touch, will still turn expensive, delicate chips into expensive sand.
Yeah, they're pretty, but it looks like they'll probably also shorten the life of your 1337 g4m1n6 r1g.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Buy metal window screening. Here's a sample for those of you who live in countries that, for whatever reason, don't use this stuff. [ I hate going to England during the summer -- this is one of the reasons. ].
Cut to cover plexiglass.
Ensure there is no paint on inside of case. Scrub it off if there is.
Sandwich window screen between case and plexiglass (you will have to remove the plexiglass to do this).
Enjoy full radio EM sheilding. Be happy that your neighbours don't hate you.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
That's what they get for having sex... Sometimes, I'm pretty glad I'm a dork, girlfriend-less virgin. Heh, maybe not... /me cries
What I can't figure out is why anyone would actually want to "customize" the appearance of their industrial duty number cruncher to begin with. What IS the point here? To show all the car and bike freaks, "look, am I not way cool?" I think somebody's trolling here.......
I dont really care about clear cases, what does bug me is when people buy computers with mods to them.. sometimes being clear windows and stuff.. Just lame.
I've left to find myself. If you happen to see me, please, keep me there until I return.
I don't know about the rest of you, but everytime I open my case, it's full of dust. I'm really not into vacumming my case just to be hip.
Well, let's say I got everything installed and it looked great. Then I would have to open it up every month(at least) to clean it. With all the air going though there, the housing won't look pretty for long.
my sig
"making your computer the envy of all the other computers on the block?" Who gives a shit? Not I and I have really cool cases dot com... fuck you!
Need I say it??? yes NIGGERS!!! Not NEWS!!!! Assholes!!!Not News!!!!! Not even honorable mention!!!!!! Niggers!
Apparently?
Apparently you made that up?
Come on. Back it up with a link please.
Bullshit. You are merely jealous! If you had a cool case, then you would flaunt it! Coward!
...e-ricers are teh gay
face it, case modders, you're no different than the guy who puts a cardboard spoiler and a type-r sticker on his civic
I have enough RFI making SWLing a major proctalgia. I'll stay with a tasteful Eeyore sticker for decoration, thank you very much.
This actually happened to a friend of mine.. He was building a house for his car, as he wanted a MP3 player (this was about 4 years ago).
He decided it would be really cool if he made the case entirely see-through (as many of these cases are.) So he completes the case, and goes home one evening. We had a storm that night. He comes back the next day, and as he's about to pick up the case, a huge (think RA2 Tesla trooper huge) arc goes across his motherboard. IT TURNED THE MOTHERBOARD BLACK.
Needless to say, he decided not to attempt building another clear case.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
Just remember, 10 years from now your cool modded case with its dual Athlon 2600s is going to look like a funny piece of crap.
haha doesnt anyone get what this guy is saying? its a satire of a lot of slashdotters postings. haha he is making fun of linux users!!!! i love his sense of humor and the intelligent way he used it.
im one, of only a few.....
...unlike at least 97% of the posters in this thread. I bought it for fun when I replaced my motherboard about six months ago.
I like the way it looks, which is important since it's sitting in front of me whenever I do any computer-related work at home.
I probably wouldn't buy one again though, because it's a hassle to keep clean, and I haven't found a way to keep the cabling looking neat since there's nowhere to hide the excess. Also, because the expansion card mounting bracket is Lucite like the rest of the case, it's kind of fragile. I think Soyo makes a case with a metal bracket, but they hadn't released it when I got this one.
I haven't experienced any EMR issues either for the internal components or the external ones.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Just wondering, interesting marketing strategy...
This is for those people that use the iMac as an example of using plastic cases to argue EMI interference issues.
The day your P4 sits under its own faraday cage, and the motherboard is largely surrounded by metal, is the day that plastic cases will be ok for you to use too.
And I'm not going to even bother commenting on the risks associated with making transparent PSU cases.
How about this. A motherboard enclosed in a stylish form-fitting aluminumn shell[1]. What's that you say about shorting out? Nope! With modern 3D CAD, manufacturing and materials it can be done. Economics however is a different issue altogether. Your computer comes closer to being a work of art, rather than that lump of technology in the corner[3].
[1] Or if you don't feel comfortable with that material? A lucite shell[2] with an embedded wire mesh. Modern manufacturing is more capable than people realize.
[2] Hell one can tint, or even color the material. Let alone the sculpting possabilities.
[3] Brainstorm, I'm on a roll. With flexible boards and circuitry, even greater options open up. Remember the only limitations are your wallet and your imagination.
I won't use case that casts a shadow..
oh... wait
No sig for you!!
For God's sake people, you're NOT going to go sterile from the electromagnetic fields your computer emits... you're also not going to mutate or develop cancer either, it's simply not powerful enough (Fields from enormous power transmission lines are another matter).
The main reason there are regulations is not for health concerns, but to make sure that stuff will work in proximity to other stuff (Except of course hospitals or airplanes, where health concerns and electrical systems are closely related). If your computer were to interfere with your monitor, that wouldn't be too good, would it?
Some other myths I've seen around here is that if you block the electric field, then you block the magnetic field too... this is NOT always the case, since often the coupling mechanism will be much more sensitive to one form (electric or magnetic) than the other. I'm taking a class on electromagnetic compatibility this term, and we actually did an experiment to show the effect of grounded shielding on a coaxial cable. Basically, there were two cables kept very close together, and one was shielded. You'd apply a voltage to the unshielded one, and measure what was induced on the other one. There were clips to ground each side of the shield. The main point was so that we could see that if you grounded the shield at BOTH ends, it provided significantly more protection against noise. In fact, depending on the frequency, grounding it on one end had almost no effect whatsoever (maybe a 5% difference, and it depended on what end you grounded it on). This was because if the cable was only grounded at one end, it couldn't dissipate magnetic fields, since there was no loop for current to flow through.
Effects also depend highly on the frequency. If I remember correctly, at lower frequencies, the electric field was more significant, and grounding the shield at one end had a fairly noticeable effect... whereas at high frequencies, the magnetic coupling was much more important.
It's also worth pointing out that digital circuits are much worse for EM emissions, since the square waves used for clock signals generate enormous amounts of harmonics far exceeding the clock frequency. Even a 1 MHz clock can have frequency components past 15 MHz (This is very dependang on the "rise time" of the signal.. a "more perfect" square wave has more harmonics), so one can only imagine what's coming out of your 2 GHz machine!
You will also NEVER eliminate ALL the noise from a circuit. I don't care if you encase the thing in a meter of iron, there is still some amount of emissions. The point is to get them to such a small level that they're negligible. Even if you have your case all together, there's still the possibility of it causing interference. Thicker shielding usually will lead to more effective protection, but it's still impossible to reduce the fields to absolutely zero.
-"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." -EH
If only the Alpha Troll heard this bull shit...he'd throw you down and grind you into random bits of noise as found in /dev/random.
Real Alpha Nerds are using Procs that are NOT 32bit. Currently, Alpha Nerds are finishing up on what is left of the Alpha platform and may soon seek out GNU (pun intended) life on the latest 128bit Procs. The Alpha platform is great, but all these mainstream corporations are making 64bit computing precision look like a teenager can do it; the Alpha platform is sooooo Omega, and all us REAL*INTEGRAL nerds are moving to 128bit.
Wouldn't wanna be you, loser mainstream mimicry of 1337 h4x1n cr4x0rs! Hitachi Super H is where it's at!
I count five --albeit cool looking --fans in this case! This doesn't include the power supply fan(s) nor the CPU fan. What ever happened to the ideal of the nice quiet machine? Where's all the innovation on shutting the damm thing up?
It reminds me of the first beta-Itanuim machine I saw. The machine had eight fans and spun them up in pairs to avoid pulling too much power. The thing sounded like an airplane taking off, and everyone complained that the temperature in the room kept going up; an eight hundred watt power supply. What a joke.
Too much mimicry makes a species of nerd look much too passe.
Time to break out the Chernoble-shaped computer mods with realistic-looking green photo-radiation.
French toast or buttered toast?
a panel of led lights in lots of different colors like those flashing christmas jewelry lights and logitech optical mice promotions.
Then I could program my computer to look like Joshua in Wargames...
Ah the movies define cool (but not practical)
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
Have any of the morons who designed these "1337" cases in the first place even THOUGHT about WHY the cases were metal to begin with? Oh oh its coming to me... wait.... SHIELDING!!! The Shielding of the computer from its environment so neither can interact in bad ways with each other.... Can't wait till some moron runs a Van de Graf near his "boxen"
I am in the market for a new case for my primary computer. I am willing to spend a LOT OF MONEY on one if it looks damn cool (those clear uv-sensative ones are nice).
I have a big problem with all these "cool" cases though. My computer currently acts as a file server, and I have a Raid0 array for some IO-intensive work I do. This means I have 7 hard drives. This produces a HUGE amount of heat.
I know I'm not the only one with this many hard drives, and I know I'm not the only one who is concerned with the heat these generate (somewhere on IBM's site there is a study done on failure rates vs. temperature in hard drives. The curve is EXPONENTIAL, not linear). For *YEARS* real server cases have had the option to stick an 80mm fan in front of the hard drive bays to help deal with this. The lack of this small feature keeps me from buying one of these cool cases, and I am assuming I am not the only one.
In short, whoever designs these things, PLEASE add the 80mm fan bracket in front of the hard drive bays. The $0.0x extra it costs you will probably be offset in sales to people like me if your the first one to do it.
Thank you.
Bad, I no longer use ClearCase. I use CVS... It is cheaper. ;)
clear PCs are great, but I'm surprised no one has released clear ribbon cables yet to match the clear PCs. Something like home speaker wires would work.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I'd also like to apply the same rationale to any tech goods reviewed, especially flash new phones: on comes the perennial whiner 'well, I just want MY phone to make calls on' - DON'T FUCKING BUY ONE THEN, CUNT!
It shouldn't be too difficult to keep the dirt out. Can the idea of exhaust fans and go to intake fans. The idea would be presurise the case. All intake air would go through a HEPA filter. Should keep it clean and tidy inside.
The truth shall set you free!
If you eliminate exhaust fans, you'll have to seal the case to make sure enough air goes through the power supply to passively cool it.
The only criteria I used for my case selection was (a) the size of the power supply and (b) whether or not it had space for all the fans I knew I'd need. You should be able to tell from this that I run SMP Atlons :-)
I said nothing regarding reduction of airflow. I mentioned instead of pumping air out of the case, we draw it in filtered. This prevents drawing it in all the vent holes dusty and unfiltered. Instead we draw it in using intake fans and filtering all intake air keeping it clean. The case vents then no longer bring dust laden air into the case.
The truth shall set you free!
The startling truth finally became apparent, and it was this: Numbers
written on restaurant checks within the confines of restaurants do not
follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces
of paper in any other parts of the Universe. This single statement took
the scientific world by storm. So many mathematical conferences got held
in such good restaurants that many of the finest minds of a generation
died of obesity and heart failure, and the science of mathematics was put
back by years.
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