Cooler Master has just concluded its voting phase for its 2017 Case Mod World Series competition, and everything from Ridley Scott's Alien to Overwatch's Mercy is gracing the stage this year. This desk mod is inspired by the "Dragons" animation that Blizzard made for Overwatch, featuring the estranged Shimada brothers duking it out in the family home. If you look closely, you can see a miniature Genji and Hanzo facing off beside the liquid-cooling tubes!
Dubbed the "Winged Victory of Mercy", this mod drew inspiration from the Winged Victory of Samothrace, a Hellenistic masterpiece, and everyone's favorite medic from Overwatch. It wants to bridge the gap between history, culture, and modern technology, and is meant to convey the action and triumph in battle that the original Greek sculpture symbolized. It is powered by an Intel Core i7-6700 processor and EVGA GeForce GTX 1070 FTW graphics card.
This sleek mini-ITX mod looks part-dog, part-machine, and its name fits the part quite well. Called the Cerbero AK Mini, the name evokes Cerberus, the three-headed hound of Hades, and Cerebro, the device used by Professor X to detect mutants. The liquid-cooling reservoir sits at its head, and the cool blue liquid flowing through its veins plays off its white body nicely.
There's beauty in simplicity as well, and the HAF Pipe 480 (Spectrum Edition) is a modified Cooler Master HAF X with a ton of customizations thrown in. It features over three meters of addressable LED strips, and relies on a custom-made controller to put on a one-of-a-kind light show. In addition, it boasts polished acrylic water blocks, a custom 3D-printed CPU block bracket, and a 480mm radiator for a scintillating spectacle of design and performance.
Here's another case that shows how less can often be more. Based on the Cooler Master MasterCase Maker 5, the AVOID was built to look smart, sharp, and sleek, while giving off a whiff of danger. The final result is a case suffused with an enigmatic blue glow, cooled by neon pink liquid coolant, and featuring a side-mounted Gigabyte GeForce GTX 980 Ti Xtreme Gaming and dual Crucial MX300 SSDs to better show off its wares.
Aptly dubbed Clean Slate, this system looks more like a cluster of speakers than a PC. That said, it is a complete re-imagining of the standard case design, and the individual components are encased in their own compartments. The idea is to minimize the total case volume, and the entire system sits on a maple plinth (which also houses the motherboard and storage drives) finished with eight coats of gloss lacquer.
If we didn't know better, we'd say there was no way this could be a PC case. First-time modder Kirill's Demolisher Transformer mod features centrifugal fans in the wheel that channel air directly at the graphics card, motherboard, and PSU. The air flows through pipes in the interior of the case, which is how such an odd-shaped chassis can keep its components cool.
Now this is something you don't see every day. Cheekily dubbed Sea Drive (no doubt a riff on the ubiquitous C: drive), this mod sees the motherboard and graphics card surrounded by a cylindrical fish tank. There's nothing metaphorical or illusory about this – we're talking about a literal fish tank, complete with its own filter and pump. The only thing missing is the fish themselves.