A metal masterpiece & homage to early 2000’s PC modding culture.
Having been a bit too young to be in the “PC modding scene” circa 2006, I could do little but drool over featured builds in now-defunt magazines like CPU - Computer Power User, Maximum PC, and Computer Shopper. These machines were works of art, and often took hundreds of hours to complete. REDLINE is no different. Crafted using modern technologies like CNC metal laser cutting, REDLINE is a modern machine styled after vintage car engines using the absolute bleeding edge of computer components from the year 2006. It’s part sculpture, part computer. While the glamour shots are on this page, I kept a 2006-style build log with all the progress photos on this modder forum here.
The most prominent features of REDLINE are its dual-wing radiators and windowed "hood". The radiators are red powder-coated to match the color scheme, with six red LED fans, chrome fittings, and swooping liquid coolant tubes reminiscent of car spark wires or fuel injectors. I'm also especially fond of the handle built into the front of the hood for raising and lowering it.
The radiator wings are made of laser-cut aluminum, bent and finished with a metal brush for a, ah, brushed look. The lid is also made of brushed aluminum, with aluminum hinges and an acrylic window.
The hood uses a gas shock to open up for easy access to the internals. It also just looks really cool and furthers the "car" look. The shroud on the right covers the 1kW PSU that powers the whole thing, as well as two period-correct WD Raptor hard drives spinning at 10,000RPM. You can also see the two custom painted Noctua exhaust fans in the back.
I designed, cut, bent, and finished three identical aluminum GPU shrouds for the best-of-the-best video cards of 2006: the nVidia 8800GTX. Why three? Three-way SLI had just been invented, and was apparently the only way to play Crysis properly. Three of the most powerful GPUs of the era working together on one game? Yes please. I also had to source new-old stock (NOS) waterblocks for these cards, which was a bit tricky!
My liquid cooling reservoir is an actual car part: an oil reserve tank anodized in red. You can also see the ends of some of my custom-made wires. If this were a new machine, I would have done the wiring quite differently, but I felt it was important to use what was around in 2006.
No extreme build is complete without a cool custom SLI-bridge cover! This one was made using the same technique as the PSU/HDD shroud: two laser-cut aluminum plates bolted together, with one being painted red and the other brushed.
The fit and finish of the lid was very important for this project, as I wanted the coolant tubes to be unbothered by the movement of the lid. I think the final effect looks pretty great.
Custom REDLINE badging can be seen on both radiator wings, as well as on the DVD drive tray cover.
Since this build used a period-correct Zalman home theater PC case as it's base, some parts needed some sprucing. The volume knob was partly painted red to fit the theme. You can also see the fully-custom DVD drive tray cover.
All-in-all, this is one mean machine. I'd like to think that if it had been around in 2006, it might have had a shot at gracing the cover one of those modder magazines. Either way, it taught me much about sheet metal fabrication, and gave me a reason to make some art.