One of the primary reasons that companies attend CES is to demo their high-concept products to get an idea how such hardware might be received if it were to go into production. It’s normal to see state-of-the-art prototypes behind closed doors, even if that hardware never makes it to the mass market. That said, Cyberpower’s Fang Trinity chassis is an eye-opener, even to a jaded industry hack.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen multiple companies experiment with chassis that isolate individual components in their own customized enclosures for supposedly optimum cooling and efficiency. First, Thermaltake unveiled its $700 Level 10 chassis back in 2010. Then last year, Razer unveiled its own Project Christine concept, with each modular component in its own bay and the entire system designed to be hot-swappable and upgradeable without needing to crack the individual, liquid-filled enclosures.

High-concept prototype PCs have a long history of debuting at CES and going nowhere thereafter thanks to difficult chassis and nonstandard hardware that make them difficult to work with. The Fang Trinity, in contrast, is built on standard components, with each set of components sealed inside its own “pod.”


PC World has a full writeup on the pods and the system. Each pod weighs in at about 8 pounds, and there are three of them in the chassis. Their writeup refers to a liquid-cooled Core i7-4790K, but based on the chassis architecture, CyberPower is using a closed-loop liquid cooler (CLLC) similar to the high-end cooler AMD deployed for its Radeon R9 295X2 in 2014. The advantage of these cooling solutions is that they offer significantly better performance than high-end air cooling, but at a fraction the difficulty of a traditional water-cooling design.

CyberPower is shipping the system with a GTX 980 and three SSDs, though the configuration shown at CES is a prototype. The company says, however, that it fully intends to ship the chassis within three months. It likely won’t be available as a stand-alone purchase, given the apparent difficulty of mounting the individual components.

One reason we feel better about the CyberPower case as opposed to Razer’s ill-fated Project Christine, is that the Fang Trinity is a much simpler design. Project Christine was going to tie components together via the PCI Express bus and rely on liquid cooling for some units. It was never clear how the entire system fit together or what the cooling and power requirements would be. The question of how user-serviceable was never settled. The Fang Trinity, in contrast, is much simpler and straightforward.

It would be interesting if the Fang Trinity sparked new interest in the concept of dedicated, separate hardware mounts. Some components, like SSDs, need no cooling at all in the majority of cases, while others need dedicated airflow. It’s theoretically possible that isolating system areas like this could lead to better performance and quieter operation in a variety of platforms.