Borg Cube Case

Steelduck writes "A person nick-named Xor'Arch at the CaseJunkies forums has made an uber-cool case mod. A Borg cube based on a Via EPIA-M platform. The project took them 9 months, in which they spent 250 hours of their spare time. In total, they used about 60 meters of steel wire, and 1,5 m2 cardboard.The Borg Cube is presented at Casejunkies website. http://www.casejunkies.com/index.php?upn=010001&hl _id=1873"

ports?

[Anonymous Coward]

uhm.. where's the keyboard/video/etc ports located on? it doesn't show in any of the pics.

Re:Just irresponsible...

[spectrokid]

And here we go again; the eternal discussion on slashdotting. Expect proposals for bittorrent like solutions and demands for mirrors. I would just like to note that all european ISP's run all their web traffic through giant Squid servers because the intercontinental traffic is so fscking expensive. If american ISP's did the same then this problem would not exist.

Re: A lot of spare time

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Or pick a genre that would make people google to find out what the reference is. Like, droids from Silent Running, or the space-ship Yamato.

Re:Photos are Archived Here

[CoreDump01]

Actually the site was reachable until the second it went live for non-subscribers.

Here's a Suggestion

[netr00t]

Hey, why not put all the wire to work for your heat disipation? It may actually decrease your cpu temp.

The next big market?

[Azureflare]

Selling awesome case mods? I know I'd buy one in a flash! Put this in a manufacturing plant, and you've got yourself a winner. Man...What a cool case mod!!!~~~~

I want one!

Hopefully less than 200$ though...

Think about it, if he was able to use this case as the master, he could make tons of 'em without much additional effort... Maybe the fab costs would be high, but I bet he could pitch something this cool with such an intrinsic following to a corporate exec!

Well, this probably displays my ignorance of manufacturing... I have no idea if such an idea would be feasible. It looks like he put so much detail on the sides of the case, that it would be pretty hard to do that in a manufacturing process... I don't know though, anyone else familiar with this?

I don't get it

[stratjakt]

The case looks really sweet..

But I don't understand spending all that time and attention to a really cool case, just to put a gutless MiniITX board in it..

I mean, for the space, you could easily put even a lower-end athlon or P4, 2 ghz or so.. They don't get unreasonably hot, and are easy enough to cool..

I just picture showing off my really cool case, and then my audience looking at the screen and seeing the latest Star Trek game at 640x480 running at about 2 fps..

It's kind of like spending a year making a totally sweet hot rod chassis, then sticking the engine from a pontiac firefly in it.

I just dont get it.

Don't forget Rock City!

[Sidlon]

Does anyone remember the original Borg cube computer case? I always wanted to pick up a Rock City system from the Panda Project.

Back in '98, they had systems w/ the coolest cases and AMD processors for just over a grand.

Check out an image [totalretail.com], and a contemporary review [cnn.com].

Re:Note to self...

[Dynedain]

I dont think its the pipe so much as its the server redundancy that helps keep sites up

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Note to self...

[buffy]

Anybody have any idea what the basic "sweet spot" is to hardware/softwatre/bandwidth needs in order to laugh back at the /. effect -- and say keep bringin it boys.

I run our company's website [rlx.com] that has been linked to on slashdot a handful of times, and survived without any problems. The key was bandwidth--not hardware.

The web site is hosted on three Transmeta 633Mhz Server Blades [rlx.com] with 512MB RAM, and a 30GB laptop drive. These are connected through a firewall doing a custom load balancing scheme using iptables. Uplink from the firewall is to Level(3)'s network.

We pay for an average usage of 3Mbps but can burst to 100Mbps. The increase in bandwidth was short-lived enough that it only raised our bill slightly (less than $800--well worth the coverage!!).

So...in short, bandwidth is what matters. The hardware is nothing spectacular resource-wise.

-buf

Re:Why a cube?

[glk572]

Actually a cube is potentially a great shape, all that room for hard disks right next to your mobo, short cable runs, and plenty of room for cooling fans, just like the next cube.

I'm thinking of building my own cube case for my home storage server out of copper plates, the whole thing would be a ginat heat sink.

Better yet

[IPFreely]

That's good.

But even better, if he had run tubing all around the case, he could water cool it. The outer surface would make a great radiator even without a fan. Nice and silent.

Re:Just irresponsible...

[genmanath]

Technically, all slashdottings are instances of a flash mob (or flash crowd).

flash crowd
Larry Niven's 1973 SF short story Flash Crowd predicted that one consequence of cheap teleportation would be huge crowds materializing almost instantly at the sites of interesting news stories. Twenty years later the term passed into common use on the Internet to describe exponential spikes in website or server usage when one passes a certain threshold of popular interest (what this does to the server may also be called slashdot effect). It has been pointed out that the effect was anticipated years earlier in Alfred Bester's 1956 The Stars My Destination.

Source: The Jargon File: flash crowd [catb.org]

In this case, /.ers are a flash mob and a swarm of Species 8472

Cool, but...

[Mongo222]

Ok, A+ on a cool looking case, and fantasic job implementing it. However, am I the only one that notiuced that motherboard took up about 1/4 of the face of one face of the cube?? Kinda big for a router.

Bah!

[bezuwork's friend]

Now if someone would only build a Borg house. That'd be amazing.