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Beautiful Wooden PC Cases
mrbill submitted linkage to a site offering to sell what appear to be very beautiful wood PC cases combining wood, glass and silicon into something a hell of a lot prettier than that beige box. Something tells me these wouldn't win the recent Intel sexy case contest, but they sure are sharp.
Says the man with the cardboard shipping box used as a case. I just won't leave it on overnight.
God spoke to me.
Back before I had a couple little kids, I pulled in my dad and his milling machine to make the Fossil computer. It's brass and wood, with a neat fossil as a badge.
It's now my daughter's computer, so it plays more Dora the Explorer than the latest high-end games. When I replace my main computer, I'll gut it and put in fancy new components. The main draw is that it's silent, with the main issue being heat (I have some big, slow fans to help with that).
I call it "Taco Lazy" myself, but one of my friends prefer to call it "Taco Classic." Thoughts?
Anyway, wooden cases are hardly new. Slashdot's had stories on them a couple times. From a quick Googling of this company they appear to be new, as their link was just posted a number of places the last few days.
The modern world can bite my splintery wooden ass!
There's no Google cache, Mirrordot doesn't have it yet, but there's still a Coral Cache of it.
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Wood is exceptionally bad at this.
Which is why all the cases are liquid-cooled and air cooled. TFA claims they have been designed to maximize airflow and with the liquid-cooling, I would imagine they don't run hot at all. Not to mention silently....
A tall tower box is "Well appointed from $6635 in Maple"
There is also a media box selling for $35,000. It's nice work, but I think the guy overestimates the financial worth of his craft.
Already done here and specially here.
[alk]
These are for the CEO's of the world who would pay $6K for the chance to stand out from the crowd of beige boxes, black laptops and under-powered tablets.
It would be a status symbol. Nothing else.
...though I still prefer the all-transparent cases. Still: w00d!
The downgrade is complete! Bite my splintery wooden ass!
As I have pondered doing this, I had concerns about the humidity level of the wood going up and down as the case got hot, then cold, then hot again. I wondered if this would eventually crack or split the wood. What is the longevity? Is his choice of woods helpful in this regard? My chioce would have been ceder, what a great smelling computer, but it is very prone to splitting, and covering that wood on both sides with laquer would be pointless if you wanted to enjoy the smell. Maybe my fears were unfounded.....
I once built a wooden computer. It had a wooden psu, a wooden HD, wooden everything.
It wooden work!
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
I guess it wouldn't be a good idea to get one for my Dell laptop.
See, even before Jonathan Ive, the Woz knew how to build a non-beige-box design! Apple truly was ahead of its time when it came to industrial design! *fapfapfap*
ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
Until a couple of decades ago, it was very common for televisions to have elaborate wooden cases. My grandmother had one; when she upgraded to color we got her old set for the basement playroom.
Old-style radios also came in elaborate wooden cases.
These olde beasts had vacuum tubes, which used high voltage and put off substantial amounts of heat. They didn't have (or need) cooling fans.
Worries about fire are overblown. Or maybe overheated? Ehhh, sorry.
Stefan
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Of course it also includes a trial of WinRAR, but it is progress.This is about as bad as the misconception that aluminum cases offer better cooling than steel cases. The simple fact is that moving air is what moves the heat out of the system, and very little, if any heat is actually transferred to and radiated by the case.
If you live somewhere with easy access to cheap and skillful carpenters(e.g Egypt), you can kick the collective bottom of these cases. $35000? I'm in Egypt at the moment, and for $35000 I could buy a beautiful Arabesque case and the carpenter and his dog.
1) Go with carpenter to select wood from source provider
2) Agree on external chassis specs
3) Argue for 15 min on price
4) $200, and you're robbing yourself
5) hammers and splinters and...
6) Profit!
The only thing a computer case is conducting is sound, the heat is removed by air convection(or alternatively water convection can do most, but not all of the work), that's why wood or acrylic are actually more efficient materials for a case to be made out of in terms of cooling per noise, see: http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?p=1 00913#100913
The claim that a case needs to be made out of a conductive material is basically a hoax perpetuated to sell aluminum cases.
Building a case out of a garbage can would be more appropriate given the very limited lifespan of the average PC.
A $100K violin is worth more than the wood it's made out of :-)
(I'm not disagreeing with you, just pointing out other perspectives since the quality of the violin is more than just what it's made of)
That's a very fair point, and I guess in the same way a well made sports car might be constructed in a way that the components combine better than if you or I bought the components and bolted them together, perhaps improving with age.
I think the expensive computer case is in the very nebulous (but valid) territory of being worth as much as you want it to be worth, once the workers' and components costs are covered. Limited edition also gives it scarcity (therefore attractiveness) value. I'm sure they'd sell like hot cakes if some uber-cool media personality bought one and told the world it was the most desirable object they'd ever purchased...
I've seen something like this before, in a cigar humidor. I think I like it much better than these monstrosities.
u midor_description.html
here's a picture of the humidor: http://images10.newegg.com/UploadFilesForNewegg/h
- James
Someone in that other room is looking at it though.
I agree that computers shouldn't need to look extraordinary, and if anything, should try to be unseen.
That is exactly what some of these wooden cases do, they mask the PC behind a nice wooden cover, designed to look like a table, or decorative piece, or other piece of furniture.
One of the best home mod wooden pc cases I have seen was for a media center, and it was actually built into some sort of nice looking wooden table (perhaps an old sewing table where the sewing machine drops down into the table) which also became the tv stand for which the media pc was being used.
Seriously, computer cases haven't depended on convection since the freakin' 80s when a case-fan was someone who really liked William Gibsons books.
The manufacturers may claim a lot of booyah like "aluminium is better for cooling" and all that jazz, but it's just hot air (no pun intended). Cases these days depend on airflow, not convection from the cases material. Hence, it doesn't matter at all whether the case is made of aluminium, wood, solid steel or pink plastic.
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
Debian Woody?