Build Your Own Altair 8800 Personal Computer

But seriously, it pains me to hear of people who buy collectors' items and let them rot into worthlessness. Why not sell it and give someone else a shot at actually restoring it? Or at the very least clean it up enough that it can be stored for a long period of time with information about what it is. So should the worst happen, whoever it is going through your belongings can recognize it as something that's been cared for and not something to be tossed in the trash.

More seriously, how about using wood for the enclosure top (if RFI is a problem, a layer of tinfoil on the inner side may be enough)? It'd be a lot cheaper: I build most of the cases I make for Spectrum's Hands On projects using basswood because it's cheap, strong, and usually a faster process than e.g. 3D printing an enclosure.

But unfortunately you're still not going to get to 1 GHz this way: modern PC CPUs clock in around 3 GHz, and it's going to take more than three PC clock cycles to emulate 1 Altair cycle on average. At the 42:1 ratio of the Due to Altair, 3 GHz is going to get you about 72 MHz. Let's say though you're super clever and you use profiling, etc. that lets you use multiple cores and whatnot. Even if you get a 4x boost and bring the ratio down to 10 PC clock cycles per Altair clock cycle, you'll still top out at 300 MHz.