Posted 03/10/10 at 10:00:58 AM by Paul Lilly

Not everything being shown off at CeBIT will actually make it to retail, so we may never actually see Lian Li's PC-T1R chassis. Judging by the pictures, that might not be a bad thing.

Lian Li certainly found itself thinking outside the box on this one, perhaps a bit too far. At first glance, the PC-T1R looks like a gigantic metal spider, but that's not even the quirkiest part. What we can't wrap our heads around is why the oversized contraption only accommodates micro-ATX motherboards. The whole point of building a mATX system is to save space, but good luck stuffing the PC-T1R into your home theater cabinet or any other tight squeezes.

Misgivings aside, the PC-T1R also makes room for a hard drive, optical drive, and power supply. There's an on/off switch, and according to news and rumor site Fudzilla, should this make it past CeBIT, you'll be able to buy it in red or black for about $225.

More pictures here.

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Posted 09/23/09 at 06:27:40 PM by Jason Barry

Alienware updated its Area-51 case for the new ALX line of desktop systems.  The new ALX line itself features beefy specs for a micro-ATX system, but the craziness doesn’t end at a blazing fast GPU or speedy i7 processor.  This machine features…fins.  Not just any fins, motorized fins.

The new cooling technology in use in the ALX works in tandem with the Command Center to open and close the vents according to “thermal values.” Unfortunately, those are the only details listed on the site regarding Active Venting.  As a part of the Command Center software, you can change the lighting styles on various parts of the case as well as tweak thermal controls.

Starting price is $2,299.  You can check out the full specs on the Alienware ALX site

Ridiculous, or ridiculously awesome? What do you think?

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Posted 07/02/09 at 09:35:33 AM by Paul Lilly

EVGA set out to prove it's not the size of the motherboard that matters, but how you use it. And with the release of the X58 SLI Micro, you can use any speed grade Core i7 processor you want along with a pair of Nvidia graphics cards all in a micro-ATX package.

In addition to 2-way SLI support, the new mobo also crams 6 DDR3 memory slots (supporting up to 12GB of triple channel DDR3-1600MHz+) and 6 SATA II 3GB/s ports onto the mATX board. Other features include 100-percent solid state capacitors, VDroop control, an onboard temperature monitor, support for up 12 USB ports, a single LAN port, a passive heatsink for cooling the chipset, RAID 0/1/0+1/5 and JBOD support, and 8-channel onboard audio, all decked out in a red and black color theme.

The board is available now for $200.

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