The Star Trek PC: To Boldly Go Where No PC Has Gone Before

Posted 09/26/2011 at 1:31pm | by Gordon Mah Ung and Nathan Edwards

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Taking It From Blueprint to Build

MNPCTECH.COM, CREATORS OF THE WEB SERIES MOD MEN, SEEMED LIKE THE PERFECT CHOICE FOR TURNING OKUDA'S DESIGN INTO A FUNCTIONAL ENCLOSURE

To pull together David Gerrold's dream specs and Michael Okuda's enclosure design, Maximum PC turned to a professional mod shop. Bill Owen and his team at MNPCTech.com have been producing some of the coolest PC mods in their Minneapolis, Minnesota shop for more than 10 years. MNPCTech can do it all: mill it, paint it, design it—you name it. Some of the shop's mods are out-of-this-world impressive, but the Star Trek-themed PC presented particular challenges for the guys.

"Given the short time frame we had in which to make two identical cases for Comic-Con, my biggest concern was making sure everything fit perfectly the first time, since there was no time to order material if we goofed," Owen said. Why two? We needed one to grace David Gerrold's man cave and the other to give away at Comic-Con. So they had to be functional and exactly the same, too.

To fit our time and budget constraints, MNPCTech decided to mod an existing case—a LanCool PC-K58—rather than fashion an entire enclosure from scratch. The two cases took more than 150 hours to build, including the 3D modeling of the 25 individual parts used in each build. Our photo montage represents just a fraction of the work that went into the case.

The massive H-frame that went into the case's front bezel was milled out of a solid 1.5-inch billet of 6061 aluminum. That makes the case a beast. Empty, it weighs 70 pounds.

The side bezel was also constructed out of a billet of 6061 aluminum. In fact, Owen said they had never used so much aluminum in a PC mod before.

The smoked side windows were custom cut out of 1/8-inch-thick opaque red acrylic and 1/8-inch-thick gray cast acrylic. These were layered with the aluminum and the factory side panel.

The front grill was made with Modders' Mesh, which is 22-gauge perforated steel, and an Enterprise assignment patch was attached to the front. The mesh is functional—and retro, too.

The stock LanCool PC-K58's feet were removed in favor of beefier and cooler-looking machined case feet. The feet weren't custom made for this build, but are standard mod accessories.

With the sides and front attached, the Star Trek-themed PC starts to take shape. This shot also gives you an idea of how much work and aluminum went into just one of the computers.

To class up the LanCool's internals, Owen integrated a Lian-Li toolless PCI holder into the design. The matte black slot covers were jazzed up by painting them a glossy red.

David requested a media reader in the machine, so a SilverStone FP34S was integrated into the case. It's mounted in the aluminum and placed at an angle.

An aluminum compartment was milled out to house miniature tribbles for Comic-Con, but it can obviously be used to store PC detritus instead.

Like most of the case, chunks of aluminum were cut out and hand-sculpted or filed to create most of the latches and starship assignment patches.

The front panel sports a Bulgin orange-dot vandal-resistant power switch and a Sentey fan controller. The original plan of dual video screens got shelved for budgetary and deadline issues.

A silhouette of the iconic USS Enterprise, NCC-1701—no bloody A, B, C, D, or E—was cut into aluminum, painted black, and layered over additional aluminum. Yes, there is a deflector dish, too.

When on, the Yate Loon fan gives a nice blue accent to the Enterprise assignment patches, which, in the 2250s, were specific to particular starships and not used fleetwide, as they would be decades later.

Two MB877Sk-B Icy Docks get the storage job done. Both are active-cooled and don't require the use of a tray to hold the hard drive.

The final touch: David Gerrold's signature was digitized and cut into an aluminum plate that was added to the front of the machine.

Behold: The Tricorder Chic PC!

BEAMED STRAIGHT FROM THE 23RD CENTURY, THIS BABY IS FAST, FUNCTIONAL, AND RETRO-FUTURISTIC

1. 16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3/1333
   If we could have found 8GB unregistered DIMMs we would have run those, but the next best thing is 16GB of RAM using four sets of 4GB DIMMs.
2. Asus P8Z68 Deluxe
   The LGA1155 socket gives us the best bang-for-the-buck processor available today and offers an upgrade path to Intel's 22nm chips with 3D transistors due out next year.
3. EVGA GeForce GTX 580 Superclocked
   We passed on the hotter GeForce GTX 590, since the machine will be primarily run in a warm environment and we had concerns about thermal issues on summer days.
4. OCZ Vertex 3
   OCZ's Vertex 3 is among the fastest SSDs using the second-gen SandForce controller available today. We actually configured the machine using Intel's SSD caching since David didn't want to live on a meager 240GB of storage space for his primary boot drive. That leaves 176GB for games and programs.
5. 3TB Seagate Barracuda XT
   One of the 3TB drives is used for boot, with a big performance boost from Intel's Smart Response Technology SSD caching. The other is for backups of the first drive. The two hot-swap bays, believe it or not, are for additional backups and storage.