Acrylic Cowboy cases put your PC's insides outside

Posted by Joel Johnson, July 23, 2008 5:57 AM | permalink

These "Acrylic Cowboy" cases spill the guts of your PC to the world, making it easy to get at your computer's parts and watch it explode when you splash some soda onto it. They're about $100 apiece in Japan, but there's no North American importer at the moment.

I actually love them. I'd need to keep a can of compressed air at the ready at all times, but there's something very hot rod about the whole thing. "Cowboy" is totally right on — these machines ride bareback.

And considering my gaming PC just died a mysterious death last night, portending many angry evenings of troubleshooting, it's not hard to get wistful about how easy it'd be to swap cards in and out if I were running in one of these cases.

Product Page (Machine Translated) [DigitalCowboy.jp via Technabob]

posted in:

Favorite this!

Older Algebraic wall clock implies its own answers with the time

Newer Hitachi flings open the doors of perception, inaugurates nightmarishly trippy Tera Era

Discussion

Take a look at this

#1 posted by Anonymous , July 23, 2008 6:23 AM

Dust and cooling would definitely be an issue for these things. And if you're like me, constantly sticking your fingers in the CPU fan, playing with the capacitors until they fall off or give you a shock when you discharge them, playing with your SATA cable whilst writing a term paper then unplugging the hard drive by accident and crashing the system....

...yeah, not a good idea for me at all.

Take a look at this

#2 posted by ben , July 23, 2008 6:37 AM

Very cool, if there weren't kids in the house I would totally be into these. A friend pointed out that you'd have to watch out for stray magnets, roaming the house in search of hard drives to ruin.

Take a look at this

#3 posted by Rax50 , July 23, 2008 8:53 AM

Man, I've been building these for years. I love them. Although acrylic has gotten pricey. Now-a-days I build in quarter inch MDF to save money, but it's all good anyway.

Take a look at this

#4 posted by Bottlekid

, July 23, 2008 9:21 AM

These would be useful for a tech bench setup.

Take a look at this

#5 posted by bookmunkie , July 23, 2008 10:06 AM

The first translated product description is strangely cool: "it spends also the money and the [zu] leprosy… with the cardboard fears…
In such a you, it is easy the barrack case!"

Take a look at this

#6 posted by cardinale , July 23, 2008 3:25 PM

These crazy case mods always look so good because THERE ARE NO CABLES! Alright, they have a few in each picture, but not enough for the machine to turn on.

And what about airflow? Any rig that you would want to mess with enough would be extreme and it would get hot and there is no "case" to pull air through and exhaust hot air.

Take a look at this

#7 posted by jimkirk , July 23, 2008 8:30 PM

Yeah, air flow and electromagnetic interference. Cases are generally an integral part of keeping EMI under control. Operating out of the case is fine for the occasional hardware debug, but not general use.

Take a look at this

#8 posted by chef

, July 23, 2008 9:29 PM

Working at a tech company, my computer case was a piece of cardboard and some foam upon which the motherboard would go, and turned on by short-circuiting the power pins with a coin to turn it on. Yeehaw!