Show HN: Monolith – A stylish and functional computer frame | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Monolith – A stylish and functional computer frame

coolte.ch

42 pointsyeahgoodok34 comments

In a house of two women with long hair, I highly doubt my GPU could survive me and my girlfriend over two weeks.

Looks absolutely sleek, but if it had a base and a glass and aluminum cloche-style cover it'd be more practical. Open air just seems like a disaster waiting to happen.

I live with a long-haired person and we haven't had such issues -- follow your heart!

Cool idea but not something I’d find functional in my environment.

I personally find this messy and not at all stylish. I would also be constantly fighting tumbleweeds of golden retriever hair clogging everything up.

I wish them the best of luck.

Maybe if the demo unit had better cable management. Open air frames definitely have a market, so it has some potential. But yeah, it's not for me either.

Yep, same. From a design perspective, it looks hideous.

Is this designed to be placed in clean rooms? I can barely keep up with cleaning dust from surfaces that don't have air intakes on them...

Compressed air is your friend.

Best of luck for the campaign. Judging by how much dust I regularly have to clean from my case meshes (we have a dog and clothes are often hanging to dry in my office) I would probably never buy an open case but they look kinda neat. Lookwise I would prefer the xproto but it's always nice to see alternatives. :)

Mesh solves a problem created by Big Case Fan who want you believe that you need a case to prevent dust from entering your computer.

I kid. But honestly my quasi-passively cooled setup has been super easy to clean.

Your assembly page is 64Mb, of which 63.7Mb is from images. You might want to look at scaling them down if your server starts struggling.

I know lol. I wanted to keep the images high-res so you can zoom in and see what's going on. GitHub hasn't bothered me (yet...)

You can use https://squoosh.app for easy and effective image compression. Sometimes I can shave off 80-90% of the size without a noticeable difference in image quality.

I love these open air style designs. It's reminds me of Yuel Beast's Motif Monument too. https://yuelbeast.com/motif-monument

Doesn't a closed design produce more airflow around hot areas, when carefully designed?

Yes. And carefully designed "extreme" air cooling solutions can outperform average water cooling solutions.

"Monolith" will for me always conjure up "2001: A Space Odyssey". I want to work out a wood monolith mini-ITX case design one can assemble from parts custom fabricated from drawer.com and ponoko.com, with an hdplex.com power supply, and all airflow pulled through an Noctua NH-C14S cpu cooler. With noise-isolated fans the width of the case, the entire case becomes a turbo charger for the cpu cooler.

(For compute servers I don't need separate graphics cards.)

Not without substantial noise, which is what drove me to become open-air pilled.

My friend swears by his mostly open air case, albeit somewhat more traditionally shaped. A couple of notes from his setup:

1) It has a glass panel on the largest side side, but is open on the other sides. This prevents a lot of obvious failure cases.

2) It is wall mounted. This keeps it off the floor and away from associated detritus.

Case looks really cool though. Best of luck!

Thanks a lot :) I'm actually working on other concepts that don't sit on the table. This is just the beginning.

I'd be curious to see heat dispersion capabilities.

Same. Whoever wants to do a thermal review (complete with IR imagery) gets a Monolith on the house.

Why go for MicroITX motherboard in a case that has effectively unlimited dimensions otherwise? I buy small motherboards so I can stuff them into teensy cases that take up no space. What’s the motivation for micro with a case that’s macro?

Less desk space, mostly. And there's something visually appealing about having the CPU in the center of the board.

Every bench tester just let out a collective sigh.

These designs are neat but far from a new idea.

yea it's cool for anyone without cats. (and you guys worried about dust, I think it would actually accumulate less dust but idk)

> What if you stop putting your components in a box

... and thus remove the protective casing and allowing every possible kind of foreign matter to intrude the components, having it take direct impacts if I accidentally hit my elbow on it, take possible water damage, not be able to have cats around it any more and my girlfriends hair being sucked into the CPU cooler?

No thank you

Very pretty. Hilariously dangerous and user unfriendly for anyone with kids.

Name made me expect a towering flat non-reflective black column.

The name is inspired from this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_monolith

Looks nice! Though I like a similar design from Xtia, where they put GPU parallel to MB, making the whole thing quite a bit more compact.

I like that design too. An advantage of this design is it can remain vertical with a heavy CPU heatsink (the XTIA needs to be laid down). I also suspect the graphics card will be cooler with more airspace (I intend to put this hypothesis to the test soon). It's also not clear if they support attaching hard drives? And lastly, I anticipate this one will be cheaper all things considered (e.g. not requiring an SFX power supply) and US-made.

Are the hard disks attached to one side only ? I guess this will reduce its reliability due to increased vibration

I guess you are not a fan of Apple minimalism. Looking forward to your designs for a mobile...

looks cool but it would attract dust and hair + it would be a heater, don't need a heater in summer. Maybe ok for winter but not summer. And I bet it would be loud with all the open air fans.

RF emissions? DGAF.

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