At Hydra we are better known for our Hydra Desk and Hydra Mini PC cases, but our first "regular" (so to call it) case after launching the Hydra Desk was the Defcon One. This was our first venture out of Desk Cases and into "Just Cases" and we decided to be bold about it: the case would be compact, have space for 2 GPUs on the opposite side of the motherboard and two windowed panels, to show off all of the hardware. The very first version of this case was the most compact of them all, but the design was too "old" for it to go anywhere - the case housed mATX motherboards, ATX power supplies, up to 2 GPUs on the opposite side of the motherboard and had space for a single 120 mm liquid cooler. We went back to the drawing board and came up with the first revision; the Mk I improved cable management, moved the PSU to the bottom and hid it under a shroud, added fan space and space for a 240 mm radiator! It was a step in the right direction, and with all the good feedback we received, we ran a crowdfunding campaign for it! The main goal was to kickstart the product, and we did reach the target we had set - aside for sending empty cases, we also build a couple PCs (these were the top-end pledges). I even had a Defcon One for a long time! it was quite a nifty build and had a GTX970 Zotac in it, one of the GPUs I am most fond of. As the project took a while to be ready, times went on, and SLI configurations started to become a thing of the past, while water-cooling became a staple of high-end gaming PC and was no longer and obscure art for a few geeks. We redesigned the case again, this time with even better water-cooling support (front and top), a bit more space and a tempered glass panel at the front. This version however never was the light and remained a prototype in renders only, as we saw the market and interest for this case fading away and moved onto other projects ourselves. What do you think of this case? Would you like to see it come back?

One of the latest builds we've done is the build in our Hydra Desk MY 2021, and it's one of our best builds yet! We had planned this build for the 2021 Milan Games Week, where we'd be showing it off at the Intel Game Arena as the "PC of the Present/Future". As you may guess, the hardest part of the build was actually getting all the components, especially the GPU, which only arrived about 8 days before the event. EKWB sent us two huge boxes of parts, Intel gave us a CPU (the 11700K) and Asus ROG provided the motherboard, a pretty amazing Z590 board; PSU and RAM were provided by our partners from OCPC. Despite all their best efforts, we got the parts barely a week before the event itself, which only left us one weekend to do all the work! We started working on the desk on Saturday at 8 am and didn't stop (well, we did have Chinese takeaway food in a 25 minute lunch break) until 11 pm: that first day we got all the basics down, with most cables and tubes routed, small mods here and there for cleanliness and a lot of fine tuning and "tube slicing". The second day was devoted to actually filling the loop with water, some additional fine tuning, turning on the PC (which as any of you knows is easier to say than to do) and cleaning the entire thing so that it looks like a sweet composition of lights rather than a dust carpet... All this only took from 7 am to 7 pm! :D End of the day, it was a great success and we loved working and showcasing this build, despite the crunch to have it finished!