Having made and used several PC cases out of wood, I'd have to disagree there. Most PC cases are made out of metal for cost and assembly reasons not for cooling or even airflow reasons.Originally Posted by Wilbur
A well designed case made from virtually any material, will beat a poorly designed metal case for heat extraction any day. I have also run a PC from a card board box, two 120mm fans (one at front one at back) and kept a lower mean temperature than the case (steel) that the components came out of. It was also an awful lot quieter.
Plus arguably plastic is at least as good an insulator as wood yet several mainstream PC manufacturers use all (or mainly) plastic cases.
The only real issue you have when using non-ferrous materials for PC cases (and note plastic cases normally have some form of thin metal lining for this exact reason) is interference, and with wood the simple solution is to line the case with aluminium foil, making sure there is an earth connection through the PSU.
As for the disscussion in hand, I saw an interesting rack mount unit like this made from an ikea drawer unit, each drawer containing a PC (micro ATX) the guy was using the setup for distributive computing (rendering I think), each drawer was a mainboard, PSU & HDD he had a fan set into the drawer front. Not sure on cost and I haven't got the link to his webpage in front of me, I'll try and dig it out.
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