Pyramid by Henk Hamers

While modded and scratch built PCs often look unusual - with the latter maybe differing quite a bit from your average tower shape - it's rare that we see PCs that don't look square or rectangular. Even onbulging project log forum, few scratch builds take radically different forms. This is for a pretty good reason, too - a case is a box for your PC hardware, and most of the hardware it contains is generally rectangular or square so any enclosure vastly different from the tower design will be tricky to work with.This didn't stop Henk Hamers or Gup as he's known on our forums. Having searched for a Sci-Fi design that might inspire him to make his first scratch built case, Henk eventually decided on using Stargate's space-going Pyramid as the basis for the design but as one might predict, it was far from straightforward.Fitting everything in was the first hurdle but the external design and awesome sliding panel that reveals a mini screen also caused major problems. We're glad he stuck with it though because Pyramid proved to be massively popular and was featured both in our sister magazine Custom PC and came 5th in a line up of over 20 other projects in our prestigious Mod of the Year competition Here's Henk's word on how he made his fantastic Pyramid and don't forget to watch the videos at the end, especially the seven minute walkthrough!I've been building PCs for a while now, although in the past I've used standard components in ready-made cases. In 2007, I decided I wanted to do something completely different. After browsing the Internet for a while, I found a lot of interesting designs. Being a sci-fi addict, I had a little bias when it came to inspiration, and it was no surprise that designs such as the Borg cube from Star Trek caught my attention.I eventually decided to make a media PC based on a sci-fi theme that could stand in the living room. As my wife is particularly anti-PC with regards to the hordes of cables they usually bring, it had to be something that wouldn't look like a PC. With a Sci-Fi theme in mind, I hoped this wouldn't be too difficult. I finally came up with the idea of a pyramid like those in the movie Stargate.If you've seen the film, you'll know that the Pyramid, apart from looking really cool, has moving surfaces. I watched the movie again to get an idea of how I might incorporate this into my design.