Remember that arcade machine that looked like decorative wooden furniture, allowing you to keep one in the living room without making the space look like a college apartment? Yeah, it’s pretty awesome. The outfit behind that, Love Hulten, has recently decided to bring the same elegant design to your desktop gaming system in the form of the Datorbox.
A full-fledged gaming PC, the rig comes in a wooden box that’s around the size of a large coffee table hardcover. And no, it doesn’t look like a gaming desktop whatsoever, with aesthetics that look a lot closer to vintage audio equipment than modern gaming PCs.
The Love Hulten Datorbox measures a compact 12.2 x 9.4 x 2.8 inches, making it easy to make room for even in cramped gaming desks. And, yes, the darn thing can be stood upright like a traditional gaming tower, ensuring you can position it to take up a minimum amount of space. Wooden panels on the top, bottom, sides, and back give it a warm aesthetic that’s quite the meaningful departure from the all-metal build of traditional desktop enclosures, while the contrasting front panel (that’s either cut in brass or white marble) adds a unique and refined touch.
For cooling, the case comes with a Saturn-shaped vent on top that sits right over a fan drawing hot air from the rig and pushing it out through the integrated opening. Six bulb caps on the front light up in a Larson Scanner pattern whenever the PC is in use, making for a unique, retro-style counterpart to the fancy lighting effects found on modern gaming desktops.
As for the actual PC, the Datorbox comes in a Gamers Deluxe version that houses an Intel Core i7 CPU, a 6GB Nvidia GTX 1060 3, 8GB of RAM (upgradable up to 32GB), and two SSD drives (256GB and 1TB). According to the outfit, the setup packs enough muscle to handle any modern PC title, along with any games or content for your Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and other PC-based VR platforms. It stays reasonably quiet when you’re playing, too, producing a maximum operating noise of just 34 decibels when pushed to the hilt.
Of course, it comes with both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for wireless connectivity, along with a healthy selection of ports. Available slots include two USB 3.1 ports, four USB 2.0 slots, one DisplayPort, an HDMI slot, one VR-Link, an Ethernet port, a headphone slot, and microphone line-in/line-out.
It comes in two case colors: orange and dark emerald green, with the former sporting the marble white panel and the latter getting the brass counterpart. Both of them, by the way, look like props straight out of a 60s-era sci-fi flick, making it the perfect rig to give your gaming setup a campy retro vibe. You can also get it in a special custom finish, by the way, although that comes with an additional charge.
Only 50 units of the Datorbox will be made, with each case handcrafted by Love Hulten himself in his Sweden studio. Price starts at €2,099.