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Thinking "out of the box" when building a PC
More and more, as I look at prefabricated cases for PCs, I ask myself:
what prevents someone from building a PC with no case? For example, why couldn't you, say, build some sort of wooden mounting area into a wall or a desk, then mount all the components to it, so that you have something that blends into the furniture and/or something with plenty of open space to ease maintenance and keep the machine cooler? Why does everything always have to be in a cramped box? As long as you respect things like cable lengths, are there other limitations? Beyond cable lengths, it occurred to me that perhaps rotating parts like CD and especially disk drives need to rotate in a horizontal plane in order to have a symmetric load on the bearings. Is this true? I've seen PCs in the past with disk drives mounted vertically, and one of them was quite new (although it failed for other reasons later on--it was pretty cheap). Do disk drives have to be mounted in only certain orientations? Another concern might be EMI, but if you had a metal mesh enclosure or something around the machine that you could close and ground, wouldn't that stop EMI? Does anyone really have much trouble with EMI, anyway? Anyway, what I picture is a sort of vast PC with tons of room between components, almost like a huge rack in the style of old mainframes into which you could easily stick your arm if you had to replace something. Current cases are so cramped that one must pay careful attention not to break anything when removing or adding parts, and the air circulation never seems to be anywhere close to ideal. Maybe something that fits under a desktop (literally) would work. You'd have a hinged door on the desktop, and when you lift it up, you have your PC components all nicely mounted in a roomy enclosure with plenty of space to maintain or upgrade them, and powerful silent fans to keep the whole thing comfortably cool. It would be the opposite of a laptop: instead of trying to squeeze everything into the smallest possible space, you'd be spreading it out into a very large and accessible place that could potentially give you years of easy and trouble-free use--and could be discreet enough that people wouldn't even know that you had a PC (out of sight, and out of sound). I've seen companies that build special furniture to receive a PC, but it's always just a spot into which a standard cabinet can be fitted. I haven't found anyone who builds PCs directly into furniture, walls, etc. Maybe there's no much demand for easy access. I'm the type who would like to see subfloors and false ceilings with open cable trays and access |
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