THE CRUNCH
Forget RGB and OLED screens. Aftershock PC in Australia is selling a $14,000 gaming PC that doubles as a sculpture. The Cherry Bloom PC features a custom-built tree with 70 handcrafted titanium-alloy cherry blossoms that mechanically unfurl when the machine heats up, requiring no motors or electricity. The system is powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, 64GB of DDR5 memory, and a GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card, housed a
The PC is built around the APNX V2 chassis, which offers wrap-around glass on three sides to showcase the sculpture. Inside, it uses a custom open-loop liquid cooling setup, an 1300-watt modular power supply, a 2TB Lexar NQ790 SSD, and a Gigabyte X870E motherboard. The Zotac Gaming-designed machine is commercially available now, though the eye-watering price of approximately $14,150 USD does not include shipping.
The blooming mechanism is a clever piece of engineering that uses the thermal energy from the high-end components to physically expand the titanium petals. This heat-reactive design means the blossoms are completely passive, relying on the natural expansion of the metal to create the effect. The system also includes eight Aftershock Chrome RGB fans and Windows 11 Professional.