What do you get if you cross a kind, benevolent soul with the innovative spirit of an engineer? The Lego Folding Farm. Housing three motherboards, three Core i7 2600k CPUs overclocked to 4.7 GHz, oodles of RAM, some SSDs and a hard drive, a single 1200W power supply, and designed with the single purpose of helping to cure cancer and other maladies, the Lego Folding Farm is both fundamentally awesome and truly a beautiful sight to behold.

Designed by Mike Schropp, who quite rightly goes by the nickname “totalgeek,” The Lego Folding Farm was borne out of the need to replace an aging folding farm that drew too much power and didn’t deliver enough crunching points. In true geek style, Schropp owns a lot of Lego — and with every project, including the Lego Folding Farm, Schropp always ends up asking himself the killer question: “Can I use Legos?” The answer, as you see below, is an unwavering “yes.”

The Lego enclosure certainly looks impressive, but basically it’s just a cube — a cube made out of 2,000 bricks. There are two sets of aluminium bars with standard screw holes and standoffs — one pair is in the middle, which has two motherboards attached to it (above and below), and one pair is at the top with the third motherboard hanging from it. Schropp says the key to building a stable structure out of Lego is compressive force, and the aluminium bars mean that all of the major components bear down on the external, loading-bearing Lego walls. Not a drop of glue or adhesive was used.

Other than structural integrity, the only other major consideration in the Lego Folding Farm is airflow and air pressure. Each of the heatsinks has a front and rear fan, and the case also has a wall of front and rear fans on either side of it. All of the components are very tightly spaced to prevent areas of low pressure — and as you can see from the pictures, almost every wire has been painstakingly (lovingly?) hidden using Lego ducting, ensuring that air flow is as smooth as possible.

All in all, the entire system cost $1,800 in components (not including Legos) and weighs somewhere in the region of 15kg (33lbs). The previous workstation (a Phenom quad-core system), which the Lego Folding Farm was explicitly designed to beat, drew 350 watts at full load and scored 10,000 crunching points per day on IBM’s World Community Grid. The Lego Folding Farm, by comparison, draws 670 watts at full load and scores no less than 135,000 crunching points per day. Not bad for the most beautiful computer we’ve ever seen.

Read more about the Lego Folding Farm (and look at lots and lots of pretty photos)