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Clean Slate: A museum-quality custom case design from Jeffrey Stephenson

We've called Jeffrey Stephenson the "Frank Lloyd Wright of case design." He's back with a new, modular design called Clean Slate.
By David Gewirtz, Senior Contributing Editor
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Clean Slate

Jeffrey Stephenson is back with another concept case design. This one is called Clean Slate, and like his other designs, this one is also not for sale.

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Fabricating the base

Most of Stephenson's designs are fabricated mostly in wood, giving his custom PCs the feel of fine cabinetry, not cold technology.

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The main tray

Stephenson was limited in tower placement, since the placement of the video card and CPU are a function of the mobo layout.

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Crafting a module

This build eschews the single, monolithic design we all know in computer cases. Instead, he builds each major PC component as its own module.

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Module screens

The mesh is called Banker Wire. By using different mesh densities, on the sides and tops of some towers, it helps trick the eye into a perception of greater size.

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Test fitting the modules

You can begin to see how the component towers fit together in this test fit.

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Hiding a fan

Here's where you can really begin to see the fusing of cold PC tech with the warmth of the wood.

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You'd never know this is wood

Once the shrouds are painted, you'd never know these were wooden sculptures.

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Finishing the platform

He was able to use some artistic license with power supply placement.

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The finished modules

The platform houses the motherboard, but also serves to provide fixtures that place and hold the module towers.

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Before final finish and paint is applied

Here's another test fit with some finish applied and detail work still to go.

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It's smaller than you'd think

I'll bet you thought this was going to be a much larger machine, didn't you?

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Plenty of room for essentials

That's a relatively small SFX form-factor power supply on board.

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Still room for mobo access

There's a Micro-ATX motherboard with a Socket 1151 dual-core CPU running at a pretty good 3.3Ghz clock speed.

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Lots of cooling

Clean Slate is using a last-generation 4GB video card with 8GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. In other words, this isn't just art. It's meant to run.

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The assembled machine

For years, we've seen stagnation in the growth of the PC and its design. Stephenson regularly shows us that there are so many more possibilities.

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