In a world of shrinking desktop PC margins, you can’t blame manufacturers from trying to mix things up a little. And that’s exactly what Silent Power has done with its tiny new computer, which looks like a weird marriage between a sponge and a dying garden hedge.

The funny reddish growth on top of the metal box isn’t for show, however: it’s a heat sink, allowing the PC to eschew the use of fans, which take up space and whirr distractingly. The copper “foam” keeps the computer’s innards cool and doesn’t make any noise while it does so. Its bad-1970s-haircut looks are merely a bonus

Sweet specs, not-so-stylish setup

The computer has a powerful Core i7 Haswell processor along with a beefy discrete Nvidia graphics card. With a muscular setup like that, cooling matters.

There’s one catch, though: it’s not technically on sale just yet. This computer is being crowdfunded in a way by preorders. Once they reach €45,000 worth of preorders, only then will the computers actually be manufactured.

How much will the computer cost? Well, there are three variants: €699 (R10,050) will get you a 500GB SSD with 8GB of RAM, €769 (R11,050) will get you 16GB of RAM, while the limited edition €1,159 (R16,650) version will give you 16GB and twice the storage space (a 1TB SSD).

If a potted PC is your dream come true, then go on and preorder one (you might need to know some German). Amazingly the campaign has already seen nearly half its preorder amount reached. A dream PC for someone who has just enough space for a big monitor and not much else, perhaps? Just try not to accidentally water it.

Source: The Verge