A coworker asked me to post some pictures of my gaming pod, so here they are.


http://www.renolanparty.com/projects/gamingpod/

History: I have two toddlers at home and they love to jack up my stuff. During the day they are loud and I can't get any work/play done and at night I am too loud and they can't sleep. I have been kicking this idea around for years. Last year I sold my Jeep and built a new rig and replaced my two beloved Viewsonic 19" CRTs. I figured this was a good time to build the pod as well. I went to the Pic-N-Pull here in Reno and nabbed a captain’s chair out of a date rape van. I used that and some milk crates to mock up how I wanted the pod laid out. Everything was built to proportions of my body. The center of the screen is at eye level. The KB/mouse shelf slides in and out for a perfect fit. The chair slides in and out as well, plus it reclines. I have 5.1 surround sound. The whole thing is made of ¾ HDF (the same stuff as speaker boxes for those in the know) and no matter how loud I get you can hardly hear anything outside the box. as would be expected you can't keep a gaming rig in a cabinet and I installed a blower tyoe fan to cycle the air; it works very well. the bottom compartment was for a server that I had build but the 7 hard drives were too loud so I just left it empty.

I really had a hard time deciding to buy a $1500 (with 5 year warranty) screen that I had never tried out before hand. That and I really like my CRTs. But after about a day I was convinced I had made the right choice. I got the Dell 30” LCD. Gaming on this thing is amazing; 2560x1600 is like nothing I have seen on a CRT. Oddly enough though there is about the same amount of visual data (raw pixel count) as just one 19” CRT, but it just looks so much better and brighter. With the doors shut and the speakers cranked it is just like being at the movies with that huge screen right in your face. My wife painted it black and was going to paint the UT3 logo on it but summer came aound and she lost interest.

If you have $300 laying around I suggest you build a pod.