What do you think are the best looking computers and consoles?

Falken

replied like the talking-too-much mofucka that I am

Edit: lol, first post of a new page and it's a whitenoise post. Toot toot!

Synthesis

minor incident wrote:

Yeah, I mean, they're mostly all beautiful, as a good liquid cooling system tends to be, but damn. A lot of them are like little ricer cars. Insane amounts of work on the exterior. Honda Civic on the inside.

Except a Honda Civic can actually, well, move at car speeds. They're certainly cool looking, but this is tantamount to putting the electrical system of a Ford Super Duty (or a M24 Chaffe Tank, whatever) in a golf cart.

Of course, I'm sure someone has pointed it out, but actually putting a video card into one of these builds would obstruct the ballet of form and function that is the cooling system most of the time.

Falken

Synthesis wrote:

Except a Honda Civic can actually, well, move at car speeds. They're certainly cool looking, but this is tantamount to putting the electrical system of a Ford Super Duty (or a M24 Chaffe Tank, whatever) in a golf cart.

Golf carts are electrical. I bet if you did put in tank electricals you'd go a shitload faster.

Either way these cooling systems are very needed. They can't redesign the chips to not produce a shitload of heat, so they've dedicated themselves to the art of dealing with it.

minor incident

It's beside the point, but golf carts come in both electric and gas models. I've got in-laws that lived on a golf course without readily accessible power where the carts are parked and driven, so almost all the carts there were gas-powered. I'm sure the opposite exists in plenty of courses, but anecdotes, man.

Back on topic, I always liked the look of HP's Blackbirds:



I also love the clean, minimalist, consistent design of the entire Drobo line:

Synthesis

Falken wrote:

Synthesis wrote:

Except a Honda Civic can actually, well, move at car speeds. They're certainly cool looking, but this is tantamount to putting the electrical system of a Ford Super Duty (or a M24 Chaffe Tank, whatever) in a golf cart.

Golf carts are electrical. I bet if you did put in tank electricals you'd go a shitload faster.

Either way these cooling systems are very needed. They can't redesign the chips to not produce a shitload of heat, so they've dedicated themselves to the art of dealing with it.

EDIT: Minor beat me to the punch. I should have said 49cc scooter, that would have been clearer.

minor incident wrote:

It's beside the point, but golf carts come in both electric and gas models. I've got in-laws that lived on a golf course without readily accessible power where the carts are parked and driven, so almost all the carts there were gas-powered. I'm sure the opposite exists in plenty of courses, but anecdotes, man.

Back on topic, I always liked the look of HP's Blackbirds:

I still have one--they were put out by Voodoo immediately after its buyout (?) by HP. Heavy has hell, but it certainly has a lot of substance. I've traded the CPU, PSU, and GPU thusfar (still have liquid cooling on the CPU, for what it's worth--I can't overclock it out of a lack of knowledge, har har). All in all, it's a pretty nice case, albeit holy impractical (do I really need to stand on top of my CPU tower? No?).

minor incident

Some of the best looking PC designs are total nightmares to work on, especially every iMac model ever.

Apple is usually very good about this, though. The unibody MacBooks are my favorite laptop to work in ever, and the Mac Pro is still one of my favorite full tower designs both functionally and aesthetically, even going on half a decade old.

useless4

minor incident wrote:

Some of the best looking PC designs are total nightmares to work on, especially every iMac model ever.

Apple is usually very good about this, though. The unibody MacBooks are my favorite laptop to work in ever, and the Mac Pro is still one of my favorite full tower designs both functionally and aesthetically, even going on half a decade old.

The mac pro is nice, I still like the G5 case slightly better because it didn't require screws for the hard drive (trade off being only 2 bays vice 4)

minor incident

I kind of agree about the G5, but it was such a slave to its cooling. The crazy air shield and all. It was almost comical how intense the air-cooking setup was in that thing.

But regardless, it's a beautiful, timeless case.

Falken

The G5 iMacs are really easy to work on, I find. Just flip em screen down and the whole back comes off with a couple screws.

minor incident

Falken wrote:

The G5 iMacs are really easy to work on, I find. Just flip em screen down and the whole back comes off with a couple screws.

I hated the stupid goddamn latches behind the rear vents that you had to release with a plastic card. Once you got them open, they weren't too bad, but getting them open could occasionally take half an hour if you came across one with bent/stubborn latches.