Technorotic

Top 10 World’s Most Outrageous PC Cases

You’ll Never Look at Your Dell Desktop the Same Way Again
Without a doubt, the desktop PC is falling out of favor as the world gravitates to equally powerful laptops and ultraportables. But some people out there will never turn in their towers of power: case modders. Members of this PC subculture are all about breaking away from boring black (or beige) boxes and building creations that better suit their individual personalities.

Fredrik Perman’s Wall-Mounted Renderfarm
When North Carolina modder and industrial designer Fredrik Perman was tapped to do some design work for the office of Pacific Design & Manufacturing, he figured, what better way to do a remodel than to pack six Intel dual-core processors into a glass case and place it on a wall?


CaseMods.ru’s Wall-E
I couldn’t leave this favorite out of the mix. Though a lot of Wall-E mods are out there, none comes close to the work done by the Wall-E team from Russia, whose work debuted on CaseMods.ru. I spoke with Leo from team Wall-E, and learned that this mod is packed with a 300MHz Intel Pentium 4 processor, 2GB of RAM, two USB ports and a 120GB hard drive.

Frank Macon’s John Deere Gas Pump
The John Deere Gas Pump is a pure Americana special from Missouri-based modder Frank Macon. His mod was a weekly winner during ExtremeTech’s 2007 Case Mod Contest.

Macon’s gas-pump PC sports a 1.83GHz AMD Athlon processor and 512MB of RAM. The pump has green LED fans to match the John Deere color scheme, and ─ to give the mod a dose of realism ─ Macon turned the gas pump’s handle into the on/off switch. Pull the handle forward to give your computer some gas; pull it back, and the computer shuts down.

Katsuya Matsumura’s Miss Kana
Japanese modder Katsuya Matsumura’s Miss Kana case mod was featured in the May 2004 edition of Monthly PC-DIY and was inspired by drawings by Kanna Higashi.

Matsumura ultimately decided to name this manga mod after Higashi, while dropping an “n” from her name.

Miss Kana, which is made of painted styrene foam and sculpted clay on a frame constructed of vinyl chloride pipes, has a 1GHz VIA C3 Nehemiah processor and a 12GB laptop hard drive. The PC parts are located in Miss Kana’s back and hair.

Chris Blarsky’s The Hulk
In 2007, modder Chris Blarsky modeled this computer after his favorite Marvel Comics character. When he originally designed this monster, it had an 866MHz Intel Pentium 3, 1GB of PC133 RAM and an 80GB hard drive.

The Barbecue Grill
You can’t throw a sausage on this grill, but this PC can fry up some gaming goodness. Found on Big Download, this case mod was a mind-blowing special from the 2008 QuakeCon festival and party.

The Barbecue Grill, specifically built for gaming, packs an impressive visual punch, too ─ I especially like the glowing orange fans that simulate the burning charcoal.

Futurama’s Bender
This computer can’t chain-smoke or guzzle beer like its cartoon inspiration, but this crazy mod can gobble up DVDs and CDs thanks to the DVD-ROM drive behind those shiny white teeth. The Bender case is the work of a modding genius from Norway.

We couldn’t find information on the processor for this cartoon caper, but the device sports a VIA EPIA-M 10000 mini-ITX motherboard, one 120GB hard drive and four additional external 250GB hard drives connected via FireWire.

Katsuya Matsumura’s Close Combat
This is another Matsumura special, made for the July 2002 issue of Monthly PC-DIY. This monstrosity, which stands around 6 feet tall, sports a 900MHz AMD Duron processor, 128MB RAM and a 20.5GB hard drive.

It isn’t superpowerful, but how could we leave it out? It’s a 6-foot-tall robot!

Dean Liou’s DialupPC
This telephone may look like it escaped from Alexander Graham Bell’s living room, but under the hood the DialupPC is an all-digital, VoIP-ready special, circa 2004. Built by modder Dean Liou of Envador.com for an Intel-sponsored event in Dallas, this PC rocks a 3.4GHz Intel Pentium 4, 512MB of RAM, an ATI Radeon 9800 graphics processor, an 80GB hard drive and a DVD-ROM drive.

(Image courtesy of PC World)