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OS Xbox Pro is the hottest hackintosh ever
Warning: some NSFW lyrics on the music in the video above. What do you get when you combine an old Xbox with OS X and some Mac Pro level hardware? This monstrosity. Built by Will Urbina, the OS Xbox Pro is a hackintosh casemodded into an original Xbox dev kit, with some crazy hardware under the hood, including a pair of 2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550s, an NVIDIA GeForce 9800GT card, 8GB of RAM, an 16GB solid state drive, and four traditional hard drives -- one boots Windows 7, the other one does OS X (Snow Leopard, we believe -- he bought a copy retail), a Ubuntu install in there somewhere, and two other sweet hard drives for video editing. And here's the wacky thing: Total material cost of the system is under $1500. That, combined with the video above, almost makes me want to spend a month of weekends trying to do something like this myself (aside from, you know, fitting it into a dev kit Xbox thing -- although fitting it into an old Macintosh might be a fun build, too). At any rate, awesome build for sure.
Puget Systems' $16K Windows 2008 server
In this world of netbooks, "mini" this and "pico" that, it's nice to see someone taking things to the opposite extreme. When folks at Puget Systems mentioned that they were working on a "high-end" custom build, Tom's Hardware asked the logical follow-up question: "how high-end are we talkin'?" Let's just say that we'd be hard-pressed find someone who wouldn't be content with this beast: four quad-core 2GHz Opteron processors (that's a lot of cores!), 32GB of memory, two VelociRaptor hard drives in RAID1, and six 1TB hard drives in RAID 5. Of course, this guy generates a lot of heat: the system boasts both liquid cooling and a ginormous side-mounted radiator -- with so much surface area, the fans can be run at a low speed to keep things nice and quiet. Additionally, a Koolance pump and reservoir unit was installed in one of the CD-ROM bays, allowing the user to adjust the pump speed based on desired performance and noise levels. Including Windows Server 2008 Standard, a one-year parts warranty, and a lifetime labor warranty, the machine went for a mere $16,338.89. Go ahead, treat yourself. You deserve nice things too. [Via Slashgear]
