PC cases come in all kinds of shapes. You can get them shaped like yachts or the starship Enterprise. As long as it has enough space to fit the board in there anything goes.
You probably can't buy one from Dell or HP like that but look at the custom PC builder stuff.
True, but having a distinctive look is part of creating mind share. When you walk into a all-Apple office, you'll see very unique-looking laptops and desktops. That's part of what makes the brand valuable.
Raptor could derive some extra points from a unique enough case. Deepcool, Lian Li and Corsair (the ones I found in less than 5 minutes) sll make some that, with a change in highlight color to match Raptor's logo, would exude the aura of quiet power you want from a professional workstation and, hopefully, make people want to put it on top of the desk instead of hidden under it. ;-)
> My biggest complain is that it looks too much like a PC by default. I remember the distinctive looks of the beige-and-purple Sun and always colorful SGI boxes.
You could always spray-paint the case Indigo :)
Maybe that would suffice to give the machine a distinctive look. I remember the way the BeBox advertised the fact it had two CPUs by having two prominent LED bars indicating processor usage or how (now talking about supercomputing) the Connection Machines used LED matrixes to show activity.
But I totally understand why one would no go for a custom case when they are trying to make it less expensive. Heck... I may get one.