Mad Reader Mod
Project Phenom
Bill “Overkill Bill” Owen knows a thing or two about modding; he’s customized several PCs. In fact, he has his own shop in a warehouse where he does his work. Recently, Bill had an opportunity to create a custom PC for AMD as a display piece to promote AMD’s new Spider platform. Inspired by AMD’s quad-core Phenom CPU, he jumped at the chance. He says the project required 200 hours of meticulous design and crafting, which culminated in this beautiful Project Phenom mod.

The system includes AMD’s Phenom 9900 CPU coupled with a CoolerMaster Copper Sphere CPU cooler, a pair of AMD 3870 X2 video cards, a 400GB Western Digital hard drive, and 2GB of OCZ RAM, all of which is plugged into a Gigabyte 790FX motherboard and a 750W power supply. Bill rounded out the system with a 22-inch widescreen LCD, a Thermaltake LCD screen tucked into a 5.25-inch drive bay, a Razer Lachesis mouse and Lycosa keyboard, and a Pioneer BD drive. The system runs on Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate.

The system is tucked into a Thermaltake SwordM server tower, but as you can see, the case has been heavily customized. The case’s design was inspired by the Phenom logo, a silver rocket. Bill imagined what the interior of the rocket would look like and envisioned triangular airlocked doors and lots of recessed surface features. Bill says that the Phenom case was designed as “a futuristic cargo box for highly advanced electronics.”

The case’s shell uses 1/4-inch thick 6061 aluminum that was milled by Craig Guth and then chrome-plated. Bill had PCDesignLab.com design the fan grilles h....