The first thing I did when I saw this setup was look at my own wall and see where I could fit one, too. Then I grabbed a napkin to clean up all the drool.
Up above is exactly what you'd see if you walked into the lobby of designer Fredrik Perman's office in North Carolina: six powerful computers, all consolidated into one wall-mounted case. Perman, along with his buddy Michael Stabile, took advantage of a move to a new office to spruce up the company's render farm used to churn through conceptual designs. We don't really care what it's used for though — it looks damn pretty. The acrylic case doesn't have a top and sides to add some ventilation, and a battery of six, upward-blowing LED-lit fans keep everything cool. That monitor allows access to the render farm from the lobby (though there are several other terminals on the other side of the wall, all linked to the unit by a KVM switch). There's also a speaker up top for sweet lobby tunes.
Check out the gallery below for more of this six-headed beast, or click Continue for a breakdown of what all's inside.
From Fredrik Perman:
- • The inner back of the casing was covered in sheets of diamond plate, the frame is aluminum and the cover is a custom cut sheet of acrylic.
- • We left the bottom, top and both sides open for ventilation. We mounted 6 LED fans inside the casing blowing upwards (since heat rises).
- • We added 10 X 12" Blue Cathode light strips hidden behind the aluminum frame.
- • We originally had 6 Intel Pentium 4 processors on the motherboards, which were later updated to Intel Dual Core processors.
- • We excluded the PCI/AGP graphic cards and used the internal motherboard graphic processor to save space in the case. There were no need for extra strenght [sic] graphic processors anyways, simply processor speed and RAM.
- • We wall mounted a 15" LCD screen, along with a keyboard and track ball. We built the 8 port KVM switch into the wall (which also controlled our file server and phone server on the opposite side of the wall — our server room).
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Via Fredrik Perman
editor@dvice.com
By twopoundbrain at 4:35 PM ON 09/26/08
Now thats just silly
By Murphious at 6:32 PM ON 09/26/08
Too bad they used plain-jane power supplies. Some Kingwin Mach 1's would look perfect instead of those 'blah' bricks...
By cnblue at 7:28 PM ON 09/26/08
Who would want to stand facing a wall to access a computer in the living room. Poor case of design clashing with functionality.
By Kevin Hall at 7:44 PM ON 09/26/08
@CNBLUE
It's a lobby-side terminal that adds a touch of flair. Obviously they don't do their work at that station. The rest of the terminals are in the office.
@TwoPoundBrain
I still want one. :)
By Shift at 3:10 AM ON 09/27/08
man, if they had the money (and the time) to do that, they should have included a much bigger screen, heh. Anyway, it looks awesome.
By meme at 11:38 AM ON 09/27/08
Who uses a computer standing up?
By Angry Rick Astley at 11:39 AM ON 09/27/08
yur monitor is as big as ur brain. retard! but it was a nice try
By marty at 1:06 PM ON 09/27/08
thats some piece of amazing hardware
By Greco101 at 1:24 PM ON 09/27/08
There's so much wrong with this mod I don't know where to start... what is it to look at? ohhh it glows pretty blue! In that case, why not just put the diamond plating up with some cathodes? The motherboards aren't all the same which makes it junk. POS OEM hideous gray PSUs, a useless 15" monitor, you have to stand to use the damn thing, it has a trackball mouse so it's more of a pain than a laptop to navigate, it's oversized in all dementions, etc. It's an eyesore. Simple as that.
By DanielS at 1:39 PM ON 09/27/08
Obiously people didnt bother reading the post and just looked at the pictures before commenting.
It's a RENDER FARM!!!! THEY DONT USE IT STANDING UP!!!
That aside, I love the idea and application. Granted the motherboards are not all the same and they could have spent some time making the components better looking (a little polishing compound and elbow grease goes a long way) But all in all I love this idea, and just might have to improve on it! I'll post if/when I do !
By ucak bileti at 5:32 AM ON 09/28/08
hi, really great computer cases, i am using laptop but i need a fast dekstop pc like these
By ffr2822 at 1:44 PM ON 09/28/08
Ah.. those that do not look can not see. While I could have done without the CCF (it's a bit more blue than I'd like) - this is a case of elegance in function. We've got 6 high end computation engines taking no space on the floor or desk, and serving second function as a bit of abstract art. As for the motherboards not being matched. No surprise. Function before form - I'd guess that one of those is the "master node".
The only thing I could have seen as an improvement actually would have been to diskless boot 5 (or even all) of them - who needs a disk when you're crunching? (especially when iSCSI to a SAN can be faster than the physical drive access)
By Chaz Palmer at 10:07 PM ON 09/28/08
I worked in this office and used this render farm every day. I had nothing at all to do with the creation of it, but I saw the whole process from start to finish. To the right of the cacti in the first picture was the door to the office - this was our reception area. Other then software updates and checking up on the progress of a rendering, nobody would be standing in front of the monitor unless we were showing a client our process. As to any other comments on the hardware - this was done on a low budget with the existing computer parts. Functionally this design made it so that we never needed to go into the other room on the other side of the wall (other then restarting the file server) and this saved time since this would require us to leave one office and go into another where we could not communicate with the other designers. Here you could see a job was missing mapping coordinates, delete the job and tell that designer to resubmit his job all from one location since the design studio is directly behind you when standing at the keyboard.
Try as we did with multiple cameras , we could not get an accurate picture of the blue glow - trust me this thing looked really cool and it totally blew everyone away whenever they saw it.
By doctorwho at 11:16 PM ON 09/28/08
gee my dual quad core xeon has a blue light on it also. maybe I'll put it in a fish tank in my living room. to bad it's in a standard tower case on my desk. I have 66% of their render farm at my house.
By Fredrik Perman at 1:41 AM ON 09/29/08
Whazzup Chaz!
Thanx for the explanation. ;) Yeah, I think I saw the UPS guy playing tetris on it once to kill some time, but besides that we just glanced over to make sure it was crunching renderings. And the IT tech preferred chillin' in the same realm as the front desk girls - rather than being locked up in the server room.
By duder at 10:07 AM ON 09/29/08
to bad it will be obsolete in one year other than that it looks awesome.
By MeowCat at 11:46 AM ON 09/30/08
I love it. I want to marry it. Beautiful.
By mr x at 2:50 PM ON 10/01/08
Ignore the haterz. I can appreciate the time and effort that went into it, although I would have done things a little differently but then we're all unique and entitled to our opinions (just about!) peace.
By Mickey at 7:32 PM ON 10/01/08
I eat this stuff up. This is a great job, and I am already looking around my house for extra parts to build one...
By Xtremegamer at 4:52 AM ON 10/04/08
what would have been nice if the had a bigger screen yes but then sliced in 6 so that every slice has 1pc and you could just click hopping from one pc into another see live previews on how are things going on the pc's ... that would have been good for like doing simultanious things and also co-op. parallell processing ;)
By Ryan G at 5:33 PM ON 10/08/08
Are those three cactus plants there for when people see the PC and step back in amazement?
By s99abx at 8:42 AM ON 10/10/08
IT Doesn't even Have Matching MotherBoards,,
or it would have been a whole lot more Impressive.
By DoctorAT at 9:48 AM ON 10/11/08
Wich OS this MOD is using. Six PCs so guessing Linux. But what do you do with Six PC you can't do with even one?
By DoctorAT at 9:51 AM ON 10/11/08
Which OS this MOD is using. Six PCs so guessing Linux. But what do you do with Six PC you can't do with even one? At least this is takeing enermous space. But nice anyway!
By doctorAT at 9:52 AM ON 10/11/08
Which OS this MOD is using. Six PCs so guessing Linux. But what do you do with Six PC you can't do with even one? At least this is takeing enermous space. But nice anyway!
By Diggs at 3:56 PM ON 10/12/08
Truly awesome! If I had the money, heck I'd build one too.And what's wrong with standing up at a work station? some people are so lazy.Altho', playing WoW for 18 hours standing up would be rather harsh.No.....I don't play it for 18 hours........usually.Total geekdom guys.More.........we want more!
By LeeHarps at 5:50 PM ON 10/21/08
Doctorat (and others), have you not read the text about this ?? - You said "But what do you do with Six PC you can't do with even one?" ... These 6 PCs are a "Render Farm".
In case you don't know the purpose of a render farm, when you are creating a 3D animation, after all the wireframe stuff is created and animated, you need to leave the computer to create all the final frames of the animation. This is called "rendering". The computer works out all the polygons, reflections, shadows, shaders, particles etc etc. Some frames can take hours to render, so for a long duration animation, at 24, 25 or 30 frames per second, you're looking at hundreds or thousands of frames to be created. So the more PCs you can get to do a frame each, the quicker the rendering process becomes. It's like having one guy painting a house, if you have 6 guys painting the house, the job gets done quicker.
This rendering process is left running without the need for anyone to be at the computer, quite often running overnight, so there's no need for someone to be sitting at the computers, only just to occasionally have a quick check that the process is running ok.
So these guys have made a cool box from their 6 PCs instead of just having 6 boring looking PCs sitting on the floor.
They don't need to have some clever OS as they are still 6 SEPARATE PCs, just all in one box and networked together. Also they don't need huge graphics cards & massive monitors as some others on here have suggested, as the rendering process doesn't use any graphics card processing, purely CPU power & lots of RAM.
I'm sitting at a desk with 5 render PCs under it and I'm definitely looking at my wall! Nice box of tricks guys.
By markw at 4:46 PM ON 10/22/08
In terms of hardware what do you think the overall cost of this ufo is, minus LEDs? I'm just starting to think about building one out, but I'll have to buy parts or dumpster-dive.
By bobby at 5:38 PM ON 10/23/08
It already looks old.