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Comment by stormbrew | Hacker News Reader

The thing I don't get is why are we so damn stuck on towers as the default form factor? It's pretty much masochism to mount a sensitive piece of 8 billon layer circuit board vertically and then hang a bunch of blocks of solid heat conducting metal to it from the side, held on only by a soldered on piece of plastic.

Bring back proper desktop cases!

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And while we’re at it, let’s bring back rack mount chassis. The rack mount market is appalling at the moment. If you don’t want the volume sales model imported to your region, your stuck getting overpriced models shipped at overpriced rates all the way from the increasingly limited number of manufacturers in china/India/etc, many of which are slowly sliding into overpriced industrial only markets. I bought one at full list price and shipping that had so little care put into it they didn’t even take the protective plastic wrap off the metal subcomponents before slamming them together! All because I wanted a generic 3U chassis to put together a compute node with low profile network cards. I looked at getting an empty chassis to just go open frame drill my own holes and it would have cost more to get a hollow sheet metal tube 3U high than the rack mount unit I bought… ridiculous!

I had a similar experience trying to find shallow storage chassis that would fit in 2 or 3u. Seems like a no brainer to me to have just a rack mount array of 5.25 bays I can put hot swap cages in but nope.

Absolutely! It’s so bad that “custom” rack mounting is one of the reasons I got myself a drill press. Sheet and bar stock is trivial to order cut to simple dimensions for panels, corner bracing and making “rack ears”.

But it still comes back to the fact i shouldn’t need to make a mini metalworking shop in order to affordably mount hardware horizontally in my rack. Rack mount should be the ultimate in “big computer enclosure” but instead of cool things like having a 2/3/4U massive rack mount water cooling radiator with big quiet fans to silence everything in a computer, it’s getting harder and harder to buy any parts for a non-OEM computer that aren’t festooned in RGB and designed for transparent towers with all the structural issues highlighted in the original article.

Right? Floor space is at an all-time premium with high housing costs. And most people I know have a stack of books/etc. to rise the monitor anyway.

Having a ~140 mm tall desktop case under the monitor doesn't work that well with today's pretty large monitors - it would result in uncomfortable viewing angles. Add to that the often very wide monitor stands. And increased cooling noise because the case comes closer to your ears.

Current monitors can be raised on their stand, maybe future monitors could be lowered in front of whatever they’re on top of?

My 98 inch “monitor” is mounted on the wall

Great for demoing things, or looking at while I walk in think circles. Keeps my desk clear, and I don’t need reading glasses to see it

And yes, the bottom is mounted well below my desk’s surface height

Mount the computer on the back of the screen.

You'd need counterweights in the front. :-)

Or the case designed for mounting comes with extendable legs to support the weight. Or the monitor is designed on some kind of lever system that can be set to balance. Lots of options.

I kind of like your first idea. The motherboard would be vertically mounted, and then have 90 degree PCIe risers that are structurally reinforced somehow, so that the heavy GPU can also be mounted vertically. You could have 2 of them, one for the GPU and one for additional cards. The whole thing would be mounted via the VESA screw holes on the monitor.

Would probably mostly work for people with quite large monitors though. 40+ inch 4k monitors rock!

... or we just stick with tower cases and some kind of structural reinforcements for the heavy GPU.

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