PC Cases With Character

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At least some of the old cases had an interesting gimmik - I'm a sucker for hotswap drive bays, even though I've literally never had to hotswap a drive in a desktop PC.

Modern gaming cases just feel tacky though - like a 14 year olds idea of what futuristic technology is - hard angles, aggressive detailing and no subtlety at all. Seems to be part of the whole #gamer aesthetic though, where the only way to stand out from the crowd is by looking identical to everyone else, RGB and all.
 
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I'm a fan of minimalism myself.
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The Cooler Master HAF XB EVO was an absolute pleasure to build in and included so much that I've been chasing that high ever since. Hotswap bays, 5.25" bays, infinite fans, carrying handles.

Horizontal Mobo alignment in a full ATX case is really rare which is why with the computer after that I went with a Lian Li PC-V33:
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GrayWater said:
The PowerMac G4 Graphite case. This was back when "Think different" meant being different yet useful and not just different for the sake of it while crippling your thermals and workflow.
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Oh yeah, I never had one but I always thought this design looked cool.
 
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GrayWater said:
The PowerMac G4 Graphite case. This was back when "Think different" meant being different yet useful and not just different for the sake of it while crippling your thermals and workflow.
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The later G4's and cheese grater G5's are fine too, but the Graphite model is still one of the most beautiful looking computers I've seen, I'll give Apple credit on that one. The color scheme is a muted blue-gray with transparent acrylic plastic and the door on the side is both functional and convenient. This for me was Apple's peak in terms of design.
Their other stuff just doesn't do it for me. At best they're okay looking, but the new Mac Pro is just bulky and ugly looking, and the prior model is literally a trash can with computer parts in it.
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The Graphite G4 is not a patch on the mirror door you posted below that one. That was the best G4 case, IMO, mainly because the handles don't have a habit of cracking, and is surprisingly easy to strip out and put a full PC inside... I've got a G4 Mirror that died, equipped with 2 1TB SSDs, 2 Blu-Ray RW's an i7 and 32GB ram and it looks stock on the outside. Have a Mac Pro cheese grater too with beefier specs, but that was a pretty advanced project....

You can get a none working G4 for free if you look around, and all you need is a dremel really to fit a PC inside, there is plenty of room with a Mini ITX MB and SSDs.

This caught my eye though last year and I ordered two for my home office, which should start shipping next month:

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Dialtone said:
If you want a case with character you have to be innovative
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Sort of off topic but that expanding foam gives me nightmares to this day. My first week in my first engineering job working with live gas one of the emergency bags that you throw on a gas main to temp seal it blew up in my face in the back of the van on a very hot day. Fuck it gets hot quick, and I looked like a cancer patient for a while because it got in my hair and eyebrows and had to cut it out (It expanded and set really quick), and shave my whole face and head. It also eats through cotton quicker than a motherfucker.

edit: No lasting harm done, it's easy to get off skin, as it's a bit like superglue, it's annoying at first but then flakes off within a day on it's own, just the heat from it catalysing ON MY FACE was worrying, but no harm done. Same as if you put superglue on cotton... It will start to smoke because it gets so hot.

So glad I'm bike eyed though, (to the burgers, it means I wear glasses) because I can't imagine what that shite would do to an exposed eyeball, because my glasses had to get scrapped as it ate through the coating on the lenses even when I got it off... My specs looked like a kaleidoscope, and the acrylic frames were just as bad, all pock marked...
 
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Smaug's Smokey Hole said:
The Cryorig Taku looks pretty cool and stupid in the right ways.
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Love it but oh god the price. What the hell.

I liked the keyboard computers of the 80s and early 90s, and I'd love a nice mechanical keyboard with some ARM computer integrated. Sadly ARM support for real OSes sucks forever and this will never exist. Seriously, the Hardware exists yet nobody can cobble together something like that as contrary to the 80s. (and yeah I know what a laptop is but I don't really think about a mobile computer here)

The elegance of beige desktop computers will never be surpassed though. Apple in it's "No Steve Jobs, about to go broke" times had some very nice designs, I loved the Pizzabox Macs, for example the Performa 475. It was very elegant and also very well put together. It didn't have a single screw and you could take it completely apart in minutes with just your bare hands. That was still a time where the average PC case would cut your hands off.

Here's some random link I pulled off of google and am too lazy to insert the pictures of:

I'd love to do my own computer case but it's not as simple as that is it, 3D printed plastics just do not look that nice. You can have Plexiglas professionally machined to exact specification and modern Plexiglas is quite robust but it's still pretty touchy overall and a dust magnet. Maybe wood.
 
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Cedric_Eff said:
We need more horizontal desktop cases in off white and in indigo.
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I really miss horizontal cases. Especially with locks, turbo buttons, and MHz displays.
The IBM PC and PC AT are just nice looking.
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I actually have a beaten up, empty 5150 case sitting around, gutted the power supply and put a 5V switching PSU in there connected to the nice red switch. My plan was to put a Raspberry Pi inside and have the HDMI and USBs and so on be on the rear panel, so it'd be a nice retro computer in an awesome case.
Never really got to that point, though.
 
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I really miss the horizontal cases. I guess the cooling situation wouldn't be ideal? The motherboard laying flat woud be a plus tho.
Mine had a harddrive shelf/caddy thing. It wasn't connected and not like I had a spare disk anyway, so I stored notes in it.
 
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Kosher Dill said:
I don't know why these haven't made a comeback now that we're once again living in an age where it can change.
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People are dumb and would be ooking and eeking when they saw the lower idle frequency, then they would try to push it to always run at max boost clock to show off the number on their case and a company like EVGA would see an opportunity to make money by making a custom BIOS that does it by default and Coolermaster would scramble to put out cases with big gaudy RGB mhz displays, then every other manufacturer would try to get in on that. We're close enough to Idiocracy as it is, no need to to push it further.
 
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Whatever happened to horizontal PC cases? I was looking around a while ago because I'd actually like to build a desktop PC (as in one that fits on a desk that I can sit a monitor on) and the only cases I could find are home theatre types that are either too small to fit anything in or sell at a big mark up.

I might have to buy an old Dell business machine and try to shoehorn modern components in it or something.
 
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