Had a dream last night...

[alienware]

I want my old case back, dammit

Back in 2001 I moved out to America. I sold off my current PC which was an IBM Intellistation dual P3 Xeon 550 using the Marlinspike motherboard. I did really well out of it (over £1000) and by the time I converted that money into dollars (where the pound was very strong at the time) I had quite a few bucks for a PC.

What set this PC apart was the case. It was absolutely awesome yet no one else seems to make them

It was the same as this one.









Only mine was in beige. IIRC it cost about $150 or less. What was so awesome about it was that the motherboard went in one side with the PSU hard drives and opticals in a separate chamber. This meant that the wiring was as tidy as it's ever going to be. The only drawback was that the outer shell was one piece (rather than the side panels we have now).

In it I had the guts of a Silicon Graphics SGI 550. Basically this board was dual P£ Xeon (gen 2, 133 bus) with 128mb RDRAM. The only drawback was the RDRAM as there was a flaw with this board where if you used all of the RIMM banks the PC would be completely unstable. It was when SGI switched to Intel and also when they decided to pull out of the hardware market.

Here is the board I had..



Which I had dual P3 Xeon 866 cpus in. The advantages of Xeon in those days was far more than now. Basically they were one of the first processors to run the cache at the full CPU speed, rather than the 133 bus. So in effect your cache was 866mhz rather than 133. This made them incredibly expensive, costing as much as $2500 each. Thankfully I bought the board CPUs and PSU from some recycling company in CA for $350,a real steal..

Any way last night I headed off to bed exhausted. See, there's a funny twist to this story... I loaned the case to my ex wife and bought some parts for her from geeks.com. Sadly something in those parts was faulty and we never did find out what so we put it in the attic at her mom's house...

Then we moved out and time passed by. I went back to look for it one day and it was gone. I still swear up and down her mother threw it out without realising its value, but them's the breaks..

Any way last night I had this really odd dream where I was back in the USA being harassed by my ex and just saying over and over "Look, all I want is my f***ing case back then you can piss off. I'm happy and I'm getting married".

Weird eh? but seriously I would loooove to get my hands on one of those now. Cut in some cable holes and route them all into the invisible PSU chamber. Powdercoat the shell black.. How amazing would that look? a motherboard chamber with no PSU in it at all?

I WISH they still made this case

 

[sheroo]

Love the industrial look of that case - its so utilitarian. Could build a proper little power house in there. Looks like 80mm fans on the back - would be better with dual 120's, but apart from that and a few tweeks to the motherboard tray. You'll have to start scouring ebay - I bet a ton of them have been chucked over the years. I on the other hand can't seem to throw anything away...

 

[Vicey]

Very similar configuration to my own Lian Li PC-343B. If you're willing to compromise you could get a PC-343B online. It's a cube, two chambers and the back looks very similar to that case in your original post however updated for the modern era.

Here is a good shot of the back to show you what I mean:

 

[alpenwasser]

Dual Slot CPUs? Mate, there's minors here, watch it with the porn! :lol: :dribble:

I remember those Yeong Yang cases, I lusted after them on more than one occasion.
The PC-343B served me quite quite well for ~4 years. The layout is nice and all, but it's just too
flimsy imo. 1 mm alu sheet throughout, not very sturdy at all. The YY case is something like 1.2 mm
steel IIRC, absolutely industrial.

EDIT
They don't seem to make that specific case anymore, but they are still around. It appears that for
Europe, their main hub is Germany (their current server cube case).

I have found two distributors which still carry that case (both from Germany):

• Option 1
• Option 2

The second one ships internationally, I'm not sure about the first one. Let me know if you need
help with translating

 

[alienware]

I like the front on the old one. It's very Silicon Graphics-esque.

I miss the old 'serious' industrial look to cases which is what makes me lust after my old one. I'd even rather have it in beige tbh.

I ran dual Xeons for years tbh. Basically at that time server products did not get rebadged into home products and due to how the Xeons worked (full clock cache) there was no alternative for that rush of speed tbh.

Obviously now it's far easier to convert that package into a home product but back then the Xeon was about the size of a VHS video tape lmao. The core was in the centre with the cache chips wrapped around it on a huge PCB.

Edit. Yeah they were 80mm in the back but that was purely for the hard drives. Hilariously if I ever got my hands on one I would use Noctua which would go very well with the beige haha.