http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/24/liquid-cooled-desk-contains-full-fledged-pc-wont-be-sold-at-ik/
https://pic.armedcats.net/b/bl/blind_io/2009/05/25/liquid-cooled-desk-mod.jpg
We've heard of productive work spaces, but this thing has feng shui written all over it. The geeks and gurus over at Popular Mechanics were able to mix their construction and PC building skills in order to create the rather astounding desk that you see above. Aside from serving a purpose as a desk, looking fantastic and being next to impossible to keep clean, it's also a full-fledged computer. Packed within is a half-gallon of glycol, twin 300GB VelociRaptor hard drives, a GeForce GTX 280 GPU, seven fans, a Sony Blu-ray drive, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, a 3GHz Core 2 Quad processor and copious amounts of "win." Check the read link for a how-to guide... if you dare.
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If science is the dispassionate pursuit of objective truth, then it stands to reason that mad science is the completely irrational pursuit of a nutty project that the rest of the world will never completely understand. Popular Mechanics has a reverent journalistic respect for those who practice serious research. But on our own time, we like to dabble in the mad sciences.
Mad computer science, in particular, offers plenty of opportunity to practice our techno-alchemy in PM's labs. We have, in the past, created a series of ?monster? PCs?labor-intensive masterpieces of technological complexity that were as wickedly powerful as they were unreliable and impractical. It takes a special kind of enthusiast to prefer such a machine over a store-bought PC with a two-year warranty.
I have an excuse. As PM's senior technology editor, it's part of my job to daydream Rube Goldbergian new designs for computers. My colleague, Anthony Verducci, however, is our digital imaging specialist. He is a master computer builder, but he is probably shirking his responsibilities (whatever those are), when he partners with me to help construct each new machine.
Our ideas often start out with a simple premise. About a year ago, I first came to Anthony with a plan to build a computer into the structure of a desk. A quick bit of brainstorming determined that there were essentially two ways to accomplish this: old-school (a classic oak executive's desk with components hidden behind false backs in the drawers); and new-school (transparent surfaces with components on display). The old-school approach was classy and definitely appealing (we won't rule it out for the future), but the new-school approach was both less practical and more ostentatious, which made it our natural choice.
So we specced out a totally visible PC. The components?motherboard, graphics card, hard drives, etc.?would all be mounted beneath the surface of a transparent desk. Because an optical mouse would have trouble tracking on a clear surface, we imagined an integrated clear trackpad that would turn part of the desktop into a pointing device.
Our first thought was to make the desk out of tempered glass, but we decided that clear acrylic would be far easier to work with. Anthony had worked on previous computer builds with Dennis Leach, owner of Danger Den, an Oregon-based custom case and liquid-cooling company. Leach's shop has a computer-control laser that can cut and etch sheets of acrylic to create any shape or design imaginable. We e-mailed sketches back and forth to Leach for two months, planning out the placement of components, ventilation ducts and holes for tubes and wires.
Leach disabused us of some of our more fanciful design parameters?we had, for instance, requested that pathways for liquid cooling be routed through the acrylic desktop. A novel idea, if Leach could have pulled it off, but leaks would have been hard to fix, so he decided the coolant would have to flow through Tygon tubing.
While Danger Den was firing up its laser cutter, we submitted our touchpad design to Synaptics, a California company that makes trackpads in many laptops. We described a clear, USB-interface touchpad with an integrated proximity sensor that would light up the area whenever a hand approached. To our surprise, Synaptics' concept-prototyping crew said, ?No problem.? Within weeks, a working unit arrived at our labs. About a month later, a massive wooden box containing our 6-foot-wide, wing-shaped acrylic desk was delivered. And more deliveries kept coming, until we were surrounded by a sea of boxes and electronic parts. Now, the real work was about to start.
https://pic.armedcats.net/b/bl/blind_io/2009/05/25/monster-table-630-ddd0509.jpg
1. The desk surface was constructed by Danger Den of two sandwiched, laser-cut layers of clear acrylic bolted to an aluminum frame.
2. A half-gallon of glycol runs through 15 feet of Tygon tubing and a radiator, cooling the processors.
3. To support our Times Square lighting, we used an Antec TruePower Quattro kilowatt power supply.
4. Two 300-GB 10,000-rpm VelociRaptor hard drives handle storage.
5. Synaptics engineered us this one-of-a-kind, flush-mounted touchpad with an integrated proximity sensor and light. 6. At the heart of our system is XFX?s 790i Ultra SLI motherboard, outfitted with 4 GB of Kingston HyperX DDR3 RAM and a 3.0-GHz Intel Core 2 Quad processor.
7. This worthless 15-inch custom PCI-E cable did not work?so we replaced it.
8. We cooled our PaLit GeForce GTX 280 graphics card with Danger Den?s Tieton water block.
9. Seven fans circulate air within the desk?and 13 bright-blue neon lights blind the user at the desk.
10. Ejecting up from the desk surface is a Sony BDU-X10S Blu-ray drive.
Steps 2-6