5 of the strangest PC product designs

If there’s anything we’ve learned over the years, it’s that PC component manufacturers aren’t afraid to take a few risks with design. Not all products need to be mass-produced for a wide buying demographic. Sometimes making something a bit strange can pay dividends for brand recognition, even if nobody buys it. I appreciate it when brands put out some wacky stuff, and these 6 products are a perfect example of strange product design.

5

CyberPowerPC Fang Battle Box

For all your LANing needs

Portable ITX and mATX PCs are one thing, but having a carrying-case style PC is another. CyberPowerPC made an impressively small portable gaming PC, complete with carrying handle and locking lid. Opening it up reveals it’s been constructed with off-the-shelf components, making it fully servicable. The parts are attached via a metal chassis that can be slid in and out of the shell, making everything surprisingly easy to access. A very different approach to a small form factor PC!

4

Acer Predator 21 X

The definition of overkill

It’s already impressive how much power and functionality you can pack into a laptop these days, but in 2017, Acer took it to an entirely new level with the Predator 21 X. If you were to look up the definition of overkill in a dictionary, you’d see a picture of this thing. Complete with mechanical keyboard, eye tracking, and a curved 120Hz 2560×1080 display. That’s just on the surface. Under the hood, it can be configured with no fewer than two GTX 1080s in SLI, along with a quad-core i7 and 64 GB of RAM. This is a laptop that very few people could ever get practical use out of, but man, I’m so glad it exists.

3

EVGA E1

Suspending a motherboard with analog gauges?

EVGA are no strangers to making interesting design choices, like the gold-trimmed or clear plastic of the K|NGP|N cards, or even the infamous red “lips” seen on the FTW3 RTX 3080. Never to be outdone, EVGA created perhaps one of the strangest-looking PC chassis we’ve seen in recent years. The E1 is a full barebones, open-air case, complete with a suspended motherboard tray and analog temperature gauges. The frame is made of carbon fiber and shipped in a heavy-duty plastic Pelican-style case, which may be why the thing costs $2000. Definitely one of the strangest-looking case designs I’ve ever seen.

2

GravaStar Mercury M1 Pro

A mouse from another galaxy

You’d think there’s only so much you can do with the design of a mouse. Most gaming mice are small, black, and have some RGB lights. That’s it, that’s all. GravaStar were on another planet when they thought up the Mercury M1 Pro. This mouse is probably the strangest-looking mouse there is. Everything from the mouse body to the skates underneath has an unconventional look, but that doesn’t stop it from being a functional peripheral. It’s decent in its own right, which may be the strangest thing about it.

1

GIGABYTE GTX 680 WindForce 5X SOC

Do you like fans?

Cooling design can get really complicated. As the heat load of components increased over time, the demand for better cooling solutions followed closely alongside. Getting the most optimal performance doesn’t mean slapping a ton of fans on something, but that didn’t stop GIGABYTE from doing it to the GTX 680. This thing is truly a monstrosity of epic proportions. Instead of two or three large fans blowing directly down onto a heatsink, GIGABYTE decided that 5 little fans blowing across the board, into the motherboard would be a good idea. To their credit, it did keep the thing cool, probably because of the massive amount of metal hanging off of it, but man was it loud.

Strange designs are becoming less frequent

Unfortunately, these strange designs are falling by the wayside for more conventional, reasonable products that people will actually use. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I will certainly miss the chaotic energy some of these items brought to the table, and I’ll forever appreciate that these companies had the gusto to bring such strange designs to fruition.