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Senfu PC Water Cooling Kit
Housing project
In the Overclocking House kit
you get the shiny square-tube rails, a collection of cast aluminium corner
pieces, a couple of thin but tough clear plastic shelves, a foam pad to
put your motherboard on, a plethora of stick-on rubber feet to stop drives
and power supplies and suchlike sliding off the shelves, and a bag containing
the solution to a problem.
The problem with running a motherboard
outside a case is that you need to connect the power and reset switches.
It also helps to have a speaker connection and drive and power lights, though
you can run without them.
There's nothing magic about
the switches and LEDs that come built into a case; any hobbyist can hook
up momentary switches and ordinary LEDs to the pins on the motherboard.
With the Overclocking House, though, you get simple plug-in versions of
all these case gizmoes. They're all just on a short stalk, with the connector
on the bottom. There's even a little speaker on a stalk.
You need an adjustable spanner
to assemble the Overclocking House, but it's easy enough to do. Pop a corner
piece into a pipe, hold the pipe with the spanner, use another pipe to turn
the corner piece 45 degrees, and it locks in place. It's a simple but secure
construction method, and the result is a quite square frame. If it's not
quite square, you can just push and shove it to shape; the corners are very
solid.
The top corner pieces also have
another post, pointing upwards; the Overclocking House is modular, and you
can buy kits with another shelf level. The only limit to how high you can
build the thing is your common sense.
The DIY Overclocking House is
just meant to be a funky looking, compact test frame for fiddling with hardware.
Installing a motherboard and its drives in a case takes time, and rabid
tweakers swap gear in and out all of the time; it's faster and easier if
nothing's screwed to anything, and there's no metalwork in the way.
But, of course, a computer that's
held together by nothing but gravity, connector friction and happy thoughts
is not a machine you're going to want to use for mission-critical applications.
The world's well stocked with PCs that run with their lids off and various
components just sitting there, not screwed in, but the Overclocking House
takes it to a whole other level.
That said, as long as nobody
leans on a card or tries to put a monitor on it, an Overclocking House PC
that can sit peacefully on a desk should be as reliable as any other machine.
And you can't say it doesn't make a statement. Like a fat-tyred sports bike
balanced precariously on its side stand, a DIY House computer says both
"I am more brutally fast than your underpants can stand" and "touch me,
and something very expensive will happen to you."
