Great craftsmenship.. very nice job. I would love to do something like this but yknow.. lazy.

That is simply, beautiful. Love the design.

Awesome. Well done. I recall there was another similar desk rig (not wood) with glass top a few years ago here. That was incredible too.

The l3pd3sk...

Ok, great case/desk. Nothing to complain about there. Great gaming rig. Only way it could be better is if you went ultra-extreme with 2x CPUs and 3x/4x SLI. But then you'd bump up the cost more than you could justify so yeah. There's a fine line between awesome and insane and you didn't cross it. But over on the file server side of things.....what the heck do you need 16 TB of storage for? What are you doing with that much storage in a desk? Sure, the more the merrier but how much do you really need? Oh, and why take the labels off the hard drives? And why a Core i5 for that? If that part of the desk is just a file server then why not Core a i3 dual-core... or even a single-core Pentium? I can see using that mobo instead of, say, a little micro-ITX board because of the number of SATA ports and the other nice features it has since this is a bling-build. There are some nice Mini-ITX boards that could have served just fine, especially since you're not putting a discrete GPU in this file server. But on the practical side, what does a file server need a Core i5 for? Storing and serving up data across a network is not a CPU-intensive task these days... hasn't been for a long long time. After all what you've built is really just a overpowered 5-disk NAS box. How does that need a Core i5 quad-core? If this was about maxing it all out then you could have put in a 6-disk RAID array for storage on the Z87 chipset with another HDD or SSD as a boot drive running off one of the two SATA ports powered by the ASMEDIA 1061 chipset that is on-board.

Or you can use cheapo materials and be creative, you'll have the very same chances of winning. But somehow complaining is easier then actually building something eh ?

Go to your local junkyard, grap a welding torch and get busy welding yourself a kick-ass case. :banana:

Really love this one - I like how it's been built into the desk, looks great, and also that good components have been used too; I especially liked how the 3DMark Firestrike results says "better than 99% of results" - I'd like to see that on my system! (At the moment I have to put up with "better than 45% of results" - ah, woe is me!)

A very nice piece of craftsmanship, and for me, the best rig of the month since I'm reading guru3d.com. I've always thought such a rig to be the best, implemented in it's surroundings! If only you'd make one in white, with just a gaming rig inside, and probably for less then the price of a kidney and half my lung, I'd order one from you guys 😀 Besides, having a carpenter as a buddy is always handy with stuff like that. Only, how can one get a custom base for the mainboards? Not sure what that's supposed to mean...

But over on the file server side of things.....what the heck do you need 16 TB of storage for? What are you doing with that much storage in a desk? Sure, the more the merrier but how much do you really need? Oh, and why take the labels off the hard drives? And why a Core i5 for that? If that part of the desk is just a file server then why not Core a i3 dual-core... or even a single-core Pentium? I can see using that mobo instead of, say, a little micro-ITX board because of the number of SATA ports and the other nice features it has since this is a bling-build. There are some nice Mini-ITX boards that could have served just fine, especially since you're not putting a discrete GPU in this file server. But on the practical side, what does a file server need a Core i5 for? Storing and serving up data across a network is not a CPU-intensive task these days... hasn't been for a long long time. After all what you've built is really just a overpowered 5-disk NAS box. How does that need a Core i5 quad-core? If this was about maxing it all out then you could have put in a 6-disk RAID array for storage on the Z87 chipset with another HDD or SSD as a boot drive running off one of the two SATA ports powered by the ASMEDIA 1061 chipset that is on-board.

Storage is cheap and media is getting larger and larger. My 80 minute HD camcorder recordings are 61GB each when I initially extract them - and I keep them. I have 37TB at home and I'm running out of space... just bought another RAID controller from someone here on the forums and I plan to add another 12 drives to my array. If it's a file server it probably hosts audio and video for all the other devices in the house so you'll want as much storage as you can get. As far as CPU - if you have to do any real-time transcoding because one or more of your devices doesn't support all the codecs for all your media then those extra cycles become necessary. My fileserver runs my plex media server which is accessible by all devices and TVs in my home as well as our mobile devices when we're out and about. Depending on the devices my server will have to decide if it needs to do any transcoding or not.

Ok so your file server isn't just a file server. Got ya. 🙂

I really love these desk PC builds. I want to try my hand at one.

Ok so your file server isn't just a file server. Got ya. 🙂

True - but most fileservers and even NAS devices perform some other simple services as well.