I ran across an article the other day about some upcoming product offerings from a certain industrial electronics manufacturer, and it got me thinking about some alternative applications.
If there were a product available which would give you a high power* desktop computer in roughly twice the volume of a high-end GPU, is that something that any of you would be interested in?
What I have in mind would be a roughly 285x105x160mm (DxHxW) and be fully user-serviceable and upgradeable (within the limits of certain parts). This would come to roughly 4.79L, which is smaller than an Apple Pro (5.50L), and less than half the volume of the NCASE M1 (12.60L). Cost would probably be somewhere in the $1,500-$2,000 ballpark for the chassis, motherboard, CPU, and PSU. This would be a roughly $700-$1,200 premium over a comparable miniITX-based system in an NCASE M1.
Possible alternative configurations could have lower power Intel chips and/or AMD APUs for correspondingly lower price (rough estimate for an AMD RX-4277BB based model would be ~$500 cheaper but would have lower speed on one of the M.2 slots and one M.2 slot would be disabled).
*
CPU: Most likely the E3-1505M (most similar to the i7-6700T)
RAM: 2x DDR4 SO-DIMM (ECC compatible)
GPU: Any full size PCIe GPU
Storage: up to 2x PCIex4 M.2, up to 4xmSATA/4xSATA(2.5")